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The 13th century Italian Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas was the first to organise the so-called just war theory into a tidy scheme, though there were Jewish and Islamic traditions to build on. To go to war legitimately you had to have a just cause, war had to be declared by a proper authority, you had to have the right intentions and a reasonable chance of success, and the end had to be proportional to the means. And once you were in a just war, you still had to behave justly.
And it was the 17th century Dutch Protestant philosopher Hugo Grotius who turned this into a system of international law, the ancestor of the system we have today. Grotius in particular stuck out for the principle that "reasons of state" are never a sufficient justification for going to war.
Politicians, lawyers and generals of various persuasions have sometimes looked at the rules of just war and declared them unworkable, or irrelevant to modern conditions, or simplistic and idealistic, or too easily manipulated. What they are really saying is that if our cause is good - and we will be the judges of that - then all that matters is that we should win.
Even less honourable is the argument that we can behave badly because our enemies have already behaved badly. And on the left, there is a tradition that says war is so horrible, any notion of regulating it by rules is absurd.
Yet public opinion insists, as Aquinas and Grotius insisted long ago, that, for instance, there really is a great moral difference between killing enemy soldiers and killing innocent civilians, one of the just war principles. This is surely at the root of the world's disgust at events in New York six months ago today. It is the same moral instinct - or natural law, if you like - that made the killing of civilians in Bosnia, Kosovo or Serbia so abhorrent, whoever was responsible, and this is also what upsets us most about the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Military forces, whether regular or irregular, must not kill civilians. If they do, they must be made to answer for it, and convince us that they took all reasonable steps to avoid causing civilian casualties by accident. Whatever happens next in this turbulent world we desperately need the just war theory to stop us sliding back into the stone age. We need to know and apply it, to keep it up to date, and above all to defend it when they try to snatch it away from us.
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And so on. Public debate in Britain this week seemed determined to disappear up its own orifices. Only a Private Eye satire could do justice to it. It was, as the BBC's sane political editor Andrew Marr succinctly put it, "ludicrous". I also liked Peter Preston's metaphor in Monday's Guardian, that the public saw there was another bout of mud-wrestling between journalists and politicians going on, and wandered off looking for something better to do. No wonder the public's interest in politics is so low. No wonder the BBC itself, for whom stories akin to my imaginary Great Hair-piece Scandal are meat and drink to its flagship Today programme on Radio 4, is worrying about declining audiences and thinking about alternatives.
In any organisation of the size and complexity of the British Government there will always be little cock-ups and local feuds, people under attack shading the truth, people grinding away with their personal axes. The underlying theme of this week's story, that the civil service and Labour's new breed of political advisors do not always get along, is at best of passing significance. One representative of each breed has resigned (or "been resigned"). So what? Despite the spat in the Department of Transport, the mandarin's own trade union the First Division Association assures us that even these potentially difficult relationships usually work well enough elsewhere in the system. Perhaps we need a Civil Service Act, say the experts, to draw the lines of responsibility more distinctly. But that is an adult point, and adults (Messrs Preston and Marr excepted) have been in short supply.
As for skull-duggery, nothing under Blair's regime comes close to what goes on every day in your average newspaper office (believe me, I spent 34 years in them). In so far as there are new factors present in this case, the basic one seems to be that London has at the moment an under-employed and over-staffed (and dare I say, over-paid?) army of political journalists trying to justify their existence to editors who nowadays want all human life reduced to the excitable format of show business journalism - building up celebrities and knocking them down again. As for the press calling politicians liars: when did you last read a story by a political journalist that you took at face value? Never? Or just hardly ever?
When the Independent made its bold appearance on the national stage in 1986 it was full of radical intentions, one of which was to have nothing to do with the lobby system. It would not use "sources" or "friends of" for its political stories - if it could not name them it would not use them. The Independent's main objection was that the system of briefing lobby journalists without attribution gave the Government too much scope for playing games. At that time it was not unknown for Margaret Thatcher's press secretary Bernard Ingham to bad-mouth some of her own cabinet ministers anonymously, making a compliant press a useful instrument in controlling the Government.
The Independent ought to have been equally concerned about the system's potential for corrupting journalism itself. Without named sources, stories no longer have visible moorings in the real world. One politician's ill-chosen remark about a colleague is passed round Westminster until it reaches the lobby and becomes overnight a row, a split, a crisis. Denials are useless. So a certain percent of political journalism is rumour, a certain percent invention; and a lot more of it, exaggeration.
Meanwhile political sources soon learn how to play the game themselves. You keep individual journalists sweet by favouring them with juicy leaks; you punish those who spin against you - whether truthfully or inventively - by not co-operating. Leaking becomes a sophisticated skill, because the one who first breaks the story anonymously is in the best position to put a favourable or unfavourable slant on it. Never mind what next week's White Paper will say, today's advance leak will concentrate attention where the leaker wants it to be.
Spin is what journalists do - spin doctoring is what politicians and their aides do in reply. Even the timing of news releases becomes part of the spin doctoring process, which partly explains why the trigger behind this week's foolishness was an alleged suggestion (an unattributed leak, of course) that someone might have wanted to hide bad rail performance figures by releasing them on the day of Princess Margaret's funeral. Such calculations are completely routine and not at all mischievous - even church press offices make them - though the press has somehow conspired to pretend to the public that they are unprecedented and unforgivable. In fact the figures were not that bad, and as it happened the funeral by no means dominated the news agenda to the exclusion of all else.
No newspaper is going to say so, but the one reform that would stop all this nonsense dead in its tracks is to do what the Independent tried but soon gave up on in 1986: to rewrite the rules of political reporting to make it honest again. Meanwhile we can do our own bit by resolving never to believe a story which does not name all its sources. Otherwise, half the time, you are believing in lies - and you never know which half.
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It was about that time that I wrote in The Tablet that there was another possible explanation for falling church attendances - that the number of regular attenders had not dropped but that they were attending just a little less often. I had in mind the experience of a parish priest who had noticed that when he asked mass-goers to fill in cards with their names and addresses, the second week he did so he picked up a significant number of names in addition to those who had filled in a card at the first time of asking. I know enough mathematics to know that if the 52-times-a-year church-goer becomes a 47-times-a-year church-goer - still good enough for most people - then that will eventually translate as a roughly 10 per cent drop in average weekly attendance. Thus the core Catholic "mass-going population" as such hadn't really shrunk. It was their performance that had changed, and even then, only a bit.
It would not have been at all surprising if a similar slight change in habit wasn't affecting Anglican weekly figures. So when the Church of England set up a specialist team to inquire how their statistics were collected and how they were interpreted, I expected them to discover a similar drop in performance rather than in overall numbers. However that is not what they came back with. I presume my explanation was not the one the powers-that-be wanted. Instead their report concentrated upon inaccuracies in the annual head-count, with the recommendation that counting in future be done on four consecutive Sundays and averaged out. And they also discovered a significant number of people attending services during the week, which were duly added to the Sunday totals. No doubt the results were just what the optimists had wanted - headlines last week about the Church of England having a quarter of a million more members than it thought it had. But I am afraid this interpretation is full of holes.
With the best will in the word, having studied the figures closely, I cannot find more than another 17,000 adults in the church's average Sunday attendance. It is too complicated to say here what you have to add and have what you then to take away and divide by. But the optimistic - rather than realistic - spin put on these figures suggests to me that there is a hidden agenda at work. The question the Church of England is responding to is not a neutral query - what is the real size of the core Anglican church-going population? - but the secularists' gibe - why should a body with so few members remain the "church by law established"? Hence the riposte, which flavoured the headlines: "We have more members than you thought! So there!"
At least as far as Catholics are concerned, you could more or less take it for granted that everyone at a weekday mass would also be a keen Sunday mass-attender. My doubts about statistical methodology concern the practice of assuming that all those in an Anglican church on a weekday are (unlike Catholics) not also in church on Sundays; and also the assumption that those who do not observe the Sabbath in the manner required by the Ten Commandments (but are instead in church on a Tuesday or whenever) are as worthy of inclusion in such figures as those who do. And the extraordinarily wide swing in the figures collected over a four week period - ranging from 860,000 to 1,860,000 - casts a shadow over the entire exercise. That is a "plus or minus" of half a million, a margin of error of 60 per cent. No such wild variation year on year was discernible when counting took place on one Sunday only, as one would expect if congregations were really that elastic. Allowing for a small regular annual decline, those earlier figures matched each other year on year fairly closely.
If I was responsible for this wild goose chase after higher numbers I apologise. All it has revealed is that "size matters" to the Anglican church establishment in a way that is not altogether healthy.
A canon from the north phoned to alert me to where the real danger lay. He and his colleagues were depressed enough by the difficulties of keeping the Anglican show on the road, he said, but were even more discouraged by the impression that those "down at headquarters" as he put it, were refusing to face the facts as experienced at the coalface. It was like being a soldier at the front who knew things were not going well while endless bulletins about "the glorious victories of our brave troops" were emanating from the generals. It did not inspire confidence. It wasn't true leadership. It prevented anyone admitting and dealing with the real issues. That is the problem with optimism. Sometimes a glass that is half full is more realistically described as half empty.
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My own first close experience of death in the family was the departure of my father 20 years ago, and I am still surprised by what I learnt that day. He had been painfully and exhaustingly ill, and my first reaction on looking down at his body was not grief, but grateful relief that his suffering was over. One might almost say our prayers had been answered, though perhaps this wasn't exactly what we had in mind. It was a benign event, mysterious but not frightening.
I was also surprised by my second overwhelming reaction - that he was somewhere else. He was not in the lifeless corpse that lay before me, because that was now just a shell, but nor had he ceased to exist. I can argue the toss about life after death with the best of them, but this wasn't an argument, it was an experience. Nor did I have to conjure up an act of faith. I just knew. Perhaps that is why people describe the moment of death by saying things like "He's gone" or "She's slipped away." And wherever my father had gone to, instinct told me it wasn't a bad place to be.
Death is the moment when the famous and the ordinary are reduced to exactly the same state - which is why they call death the great leveller. The great and famous do not get an escort of motorcycle outriders beyond the grave; and rank and status count for nothing when we queue up before the divine judgement seat.
Encountering death at close hand, you realise why they say death is mysterious. It is beyond our power of understanding. You feel for a while that the mystery might even engulf you. Your own mortality, which until then had been well hidden even from your own eyes, becomes very obvious. You suddenly discover that death and all that comes after is but one heart-beat away, possibly much nearer than next week or even tomorrow. We live on that brink of eternity, and Princess Margaret, may God rest her soul, is really just one tiny step ahead of the rest of us in passing beyond the veil that separates death from life.
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Most secular philosophers are utilitarians, and would say you simply have to draw up a balance sheet. The good done by saving a life outweights the harm in the lie itself. So lies are justified if good comes of them. But consider this one: a businessman was engaged in a hush-hush takeover that would greatly advance the value of his company's shares. He was an Evangelical Christian and took a high moral view of business life. (Yes they do exist). But when a friend known to be a stock-exchange speculator, asked him if the rumours of a take-over were true, he felt he had no choice but to deny it.
Your utilitarian would have to say that before we can decide whether the lie was justified or not, we have to see what the speculator would do with the money he might make. If he gave it to relieve starvation in Africa, for instance, that was ok. So on that basis perhaps my businessman friend should not have denied the take-over rumours.
This is where the crude utilitarian argument breaks down. That way lies spin-doctoring - or worse. If the government says public services are improving, how do we know whether to believe them or not? There is an older tradition, basically Judaeo-Christian, that says a lie is always an offence against the moral order and therefore never justified, not even a white lie.
So do we have to tell the mad axeman which way his victim ran off? Not necessarily - as was once once explained to me by a Jesuit. People are entitled to the truth, sure. That is what speech is for. But now and again someone demands an answer who has manifestly no right to the truth - for instance because he wants to use it to murder somebody. In that case there can be no obligation to tell him the truth. Strictly speaking, it isn't even lying. Similarly the stock exchange speculator had no right to the truth about highly confidential take-over talks. What he intended to do with the profit is neither here nor there. But these are rare exceptions. The rest of the time, the right to the truth prevails. I find this argument a much better guide than the utilitarian one about ends justifying means. And if it sounds a bit Jesuitical, that doesn't mean it's not true.
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In that case, I can see no valid objection in principle to various proposals to give such families better legal protection. The function of law is to provide a framework for the protection of rights and the resolution of conflicts. At present, couples who live together as "partners" have little legal protection, and there is no doubt that damage is done as a result. Usually, but not always, it is the woman and her child who come off worse. But if the couple split up, the man will have the devil's own job maintaining contact with his child. Meanwhile it is obvious that not all unmarried couples are of the opposite sex: homosexuals who live together as a family unit also miss out on many of the rights and privileges that the law gives to married couples. This is particularly so with regard to property ownership, pensions, registration of deaths and so on.
To remedy this, a private members bill has been tabled in the House of Lords by Lord Lester; and the Government has floated its own proposals as part of a wider package of reform. One could criticise this or that idea, but the basic approach is right. The law should respond to people's needs; it is not a moral dictator. I need hardly add that if the Pope really wants Catholic lawyers to refuse to handle divorce cases, as has been reported, then sadly he does not live on the same planet as the rest of us. Canon law permits divorce, where that is necessary for the protection of children and of the couple's property rights. That is exactly the right attitude for the Catholic Church to take to proposals to extend such rights to the unmarried. But strong opposition to these reforms is being marshalled by such bodies as the Christian Institute, an Evangelical lobbying organisation, and by such people as Anne Widdecombe, the former Tory cabinet minister who is a Catholic.
I very much hope that the spokespersons for the major denominations, primarily the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jewish community, do not fall into the trap of thinking that by opposing such reforms they are defending marriage. Nothing is more likely to damage marriage and restore the pendulum's swing away from it than the feeling that it is being used to manipulate the younger generation into behaviour approved of by the older generation, or manipulate the secular majority into behaviour approved of by church leaders.
The objection is heard that couples who need legal protection for their relationship only have to turn to the vehicle that society has already provided - marriage itself - to claim all the rights they want. If they are homosexuals, says this argument, then they should not have any relationships at all (which does not seem realistic). And in the case of heterosexual couples, anything that diminishes the differences between marriage and cohabitation should be opposed, as people will have less reason to marry if they can get what they want without it. That is a logical and psychological fallacy. It is not a moral argument.
Marriage is sometimes seen as part of "Christian Britain" and therefore needs to be upheld for iconic reasons. Recognising that this argument is not likely to win anybody over, it is also often said that relationships blessed by marriage are more stable, and hence the children of such relationships are more likely to have the benefit of two parents living together. That that is usually a great benefit we need not question. But it is much more likely to be the case that people who feel their relationship to be stable will start to look towards marriage, and those who feel their relationship to be less stable will wait or hold out indefinitely. In other words the decision to marry is the product of the stability, not the other way round. Persuading more people in less stable relationships to get married may not make those relationships last a day longer. It may just increase the divorce figures. (There is even evidence that some satisfactory cohabiting partnerships can actually be destabilised by the couple marrying).
Prior to the 1545-63 Council of Trent (on the Continent) and the 1753 Marriage Act (in Britain) long-term stable relationships were recognised by the law as customary or common law marriages, and given the law's protection (such as it was). Difficult though it was to regulate, this had the virtue of highlighting the Church's teaching that to be valid, a marriage essentially requires the true consent of the spouses. The requirement that it be witnessed by a priest or minister (or nowadays, registrar) is not theologically necessary. Hence many of the "unmarried" partnerships that are all around us may already meet all the requirements of Christian marriage, indeed in the sight of God may already be true marriages.
Whatever instinct it is that holds such couples back from going through the legal form of marriage, we should respect it. Where the law does not protect their rights, towards each other, towards children, towards wider society, it should be changed. And there is no reason in morality or justice to deny homosexual relationships the benefits of a framework of law, if that is for the greater good of the individuals concerned. That is what the law is for, not to poke a finger or make a point.
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Just after the Germans invaded Poland, this good Catholic family heard a knock at the door. And there on the doorstep was a Jewish couple they vaguely knew, who looked absolutely scared to death. The Nazis were searching the village. They let them in, even though they knew that sheltering Jews carried the death penalty.
But a day turned to a week, and a week into a month, and so on. The family had an old granny who was very religious, as old grannies sometimes are. She startled them one day by announcing that she wasn't sure they ought to be sharing the house with Jews, and she was going to tell the priest. They waited with trepidation, half expecting a visit from the Gestapo, but the old lady came back, wreathed in smiles, and declared: "He said God wants us to save the Jews."
Now pre-war Poland was fairly anti-Semitic, which means the couple who took their neighbours in were going against public opinion. They had lots of excuses for saying "no, sorry, try next door" etc; but they said "yes" to their Jewish neighbours and to their Christian consciences. The old lady was the voice of caution and common sense, "what's it got to do with us?", "what will the neighbours say?", and so on. But she completely misunderstood the teachings of her own religion. She seemed to be the voice of conscience but she was in fact the voice of peer group pressure. The best bit about this story was the old lady's pleasure at finding it was ok to save Jews after all - because that was what her real conscience had been telling her all along. So let's raise our tea cups to drink to conscience first, and everything else - the Pope, peer group pressure, canteen culture, old grannies and all - second.
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The slow development of church-state relations over the last two or three decades has been called "creeping disestablishment," with each of the ties that bind them together being loosened step by step. The appearance of the General Synod as the church's governing body in 1970 reduced the role of Parliament in the church's affairs (though by no means enough). The Worship and Doctrine Measure of 1974 (almost) gave the church control over its own worship, reversing the injustice of the Prayer Book controversy of the late 1920s when Parliament told the church it could not have the modernised prayer book it wanted. The Crown Appointments Commission of 1976 gave the Church of England not exactly what it had asked for - "the decisive voice" (italics official) in the selection of its own leaders - but nevertheless "a decisive voice". Before, it had had none.
Put these three together, plus various secondary measures like the reform of the patronage system, and the established church had a welcome degree of freedom. This bit-by-bit approach, many inside and outside the church agreed at the time, was preferable to a rush to disestablish in one move (as the Irish church had been disestablished in the 1870s and the Welsh in the 1920s).
All this seems to have stopped dead under Dr Carey's leadership. This is not good news for the Church of England or the country. Edmund Burke had an invaluable principle that if a constitution was not able to bend under pressure, it would eventually break. He cited the British ability to resist the revolutionary temptations that France had succumbed to as proof enough. Many people saw creeping disestablishment as a good application of Burke's law. Creeping was better than rushing. But we are no longer creeping, and it appears the leaders of the Church of England have decided to dig in on the present line, thus far and no further.
What rather confirms this impression is the Church of England's quiescence in an arrangement for appointing bishops and archbishops that has been thoroughly overtaken by events. If the church was looking for further freedom, then here was its chance. The Crown Appointments Commission system gave the Prime Minister "the decisive voice" in choosing bishops because they had an automatic right to sit, subject to seniority, in the House of Lords. James Callaghan, the then Labour Prime Minister, negotiated with the church and with the leaders of other parties - Margaret Thatcher and Jeremy Thorpe, I believe - an agreement which respected the principle that the only person who could rightfully advice the Queen whom to promote to the upper chamber of Parliament was the Prime Minister himself. Everybody who knew anything about the British constitution nodded in agreement, and the Church of England submitted, somewhat reluctantly, to the best deal available.
Not only does the Prime Minister choose one name from the two sent to him by the Commission (after its own consultations and deliberations), but he can send them back and ask for more. His own Downing Street appointments secretary shares with Lambeth Palace's appointments secretary the preparation of notes and briefings, and attends meetings. They are bound to have influence over the outcome - as former members of the Commission have confirmed. And in the case of an Archbishop of Canterbury, uniquely, the Prime Minister also appoints the lay man or woman who is to head the Crown Appointments Commission for this exercise. As well as having a vote, which appointment secretaries do not, the lay chairman has even greater influence over the direction the proceedings take.
All the people involved are, we may safely assume, honourable; but nevertheless this system is structurally corrupt. Not the least of the difficulties Dr Carey has had to contend with was the fact he was well known to have been Margaret Thatcher's preferred choice over John Habgood, then Archbishop of York, whom the Evangelicals - then in ascendancy in Downing Street - regarded as too liberal. (I think what they really objected to was that he was too intelligent.) Margaret Thatcher having been the Church of England's least favourite Prime Minister for 50 years, that did not give Dr Carey a flying start.
But now the political air is thick with proposals for reforming the House of Lords, not one of which respects the principle regarded as binding in 1976 that only the Prime Minister can recommend to the Queen who is to sit in the House of Lords. On the contrary there is a bit of an auction on as to who can make the Prime Ministerial role as small as possible. The latest Tory bid, with admirable radicalism, sets his input at zero, with 80 per cent elected, 20 per cent screened through an independent appointments commission. In this climate there is no reason at all why the Church of England cannot at last demand "the decisive voice" over who its bishops are to be. So why hasn't it done so? Has it grown too fond of the old Erastian bond? Or does it feel that Prime Ministerial involvement gives it a sense of national importance that it might otherwise lack?
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Nor does it match up to his remark that those thus treated will have nothing to complain of, as whatever the shortcomings in the procedures they are subject to may be, they are being treated better than their victims (the 3,000-plus who died in the original attacks.) It is likely they will be condemned, just as Al Qaeda's victims were condemned, simply because of the group they belonged to. Except in one or two cases like Osama bin Laden himself, it is very unlikely that American prosecutors will be able to prove a direct chain of criminal responsibility from Al Qaeda prisoners captured in Afghanistan to the September 11 terrorists. Approving of those attacks, despicable though that is, is not enough to establish guilt. They will in effect be condemned for fighting on behalf of the Taliban, or simply for hating America.
The American government's decision to apply double standards in its treatment of those suspected of terrorism - keeping jury trial and other legal rights for American citizens but introducing summary trial by military tribunal for non-Americans - contravenes the fundamental principle of common law, reflected in every code of human rights in the world, that the same rights to a fair trial apply to everyone within the national jurisdiction regardless of race or nationality. No longer is America a place where one is safe from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, when it ought to be the safest place in the world.
It is true the British Parliament has reluctantly supported the introduction of what amounts to internment without trial for foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism who would otherwise be deported to their country of origin. But the reason for not deporting them is precisely because they would not have their human rights observed in their country of origin. (It will be interesting to see whether there are any Americans detained but not deported for such reasons). Nor does what is proposed in Britain amount to a criminal conviction followed by a sentence. It is preventative, not punitive. Anyone wanting to be released has only to agree to be removed to his own country, and the British will immediately send him back.
What has happened to America justice looks like a major victory for the terrorists. The country which stood for freedom and the rule of law has become just that little but more like how Al Qaeda would want the whole world to be. What is the point of America if it becomes not a "light unto the Gentiles" but a scandal among the nations - a selfish, tyrannical, inwards-looking society with nothing any more to teach the rest of the world? Already there are few nations in Europe - none which accept the European Convention on Human Rights, certainly - which would agree to extradite a suspected terrorist to America, not only because of the death penalty but because of all these other issues. Do Americans no longer care about such matters? I am told they do not - and that this is one of the things that "will never be the same again".
The right example to follow here is the Nuremberg one. That was an international tribunal, admittedly also set up by the victors in a war and consisting of judges without a jury, but the judges were lawyers not army officers, proceedings were open, public and accessible, each defendant had the lawyer of his choice, and the standard of proof required was "beyond reasonable doubt". The prosecution went to enormous lengths to prove its case. Throughout, proceedings were conducted with scrupulous fairness; indeed, some of the defendants were acquitted.
There is no merit to the argument that the Nuremberg precedent cannot be followed because in the present climate civilian judges, prosecutors and witnesses might be liable to intimidation. Other countries have overcome similar or greater difficulties. Italian courts have tried and convicted mafia bosses who were a good deal more dangerous than Arab terrorists. German courts have convicted members of the Red Brigade; Spanish courts members of ETA. If the so-called Diplock courts in Northern Ireland were far from perfect, neither did they amount to the abandonment of accepted standards. If judges have to have body-guards, then so be it. What happened was very horrible, but not unprecedented in the history of the world.
But the most significant American objection to an open trial is that it might "give a platform for terrorism". Indeed it might; but a far better platform for anti-terrorism. Thus suggests that another casualty of the crisis is American self-confidence: it does not believe it would win a war of words. But there is nothing Osama bin Laden might say from the dock or witness stand that has not already been said in one of his notorious broadcasts, and completely unpersuasive it was. The Muslim world has by no means flocked to his side. Indeed, the replacement of the Taliban by a moderate Afghan government no less committed to Islam has brought to a conclusive end the whole "West versus Islam" perception of this conflict. American must be careful not to restart it. That would indeed be a case of "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory."
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Evidently the ecumenical thaw has gone a long way. But perhaps not yet far enough. When Prince Charles said in an interview that as king he would rather be seen as "defender of faith" than as "the Defender of the Faith", meaning the Anglican one, high level Anglican representations forced him into a prompt and embarrassing climb-down. It was as if any threat to the unique constitutional privileges of the Church of England was a threat to Anglican identity - a point which ARCIC should perhaps have given greater attention to.
One has the impression that Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor has a quiet but firm desire is to take things on from where his predecessor left them, rather than rest on his oars. There has been less emphasis lately on working through the ecumenical network, less inclination always to regard joint statements with the Archbishop of Canterbury as the right way the Catholic Church should make its contribution to public debate. This accurately reflects a more general mood. People under 40 (or 50, even) do not feel they have grown up in an "Anglican" country where the Church of England's ascendancy is beyond question. There is a wide gap between that age group and those over 65, say, for whom the Church of England still naturally serves as the national church even if they do not themselves attend its services. And there is bound to be tension between these two views, though little doubt which one will eventually prevail.
One detects, for instance, discernible reservations concerning the automatic Anglican assumption that it is for them to organise the church service on every state occasion, with their personnel, in one of their buildings, according to their style, with other religious leaders being offered a walk-on part if they are lucky. That does not make it an "ecumenical service".
This raises interesting questions about next summer's religious celebrations to mark the Queen's jubilee. If the various religious groups in the country want to come together to thank God for the Queen's 50 years of devoted service to the nation, why can't they organise it themselves in their preferred way? If the Queen wants to give thanks in her own way, according to her own religious convictions, it is entirely right that she should - but it should not be treated as a national event.
What is wanted is a celebration of what her kingdom is now, not what it was half a century ago. Anglicans, with their keen sense of what is right for the nation rather than what is right for themselves, will recognise this feeling as a sign of the times. It is not too soon to ask even more fundamental questions, for instance about the next Coronation whenever it may be. The 1953 Order of Service was, as one would have expected, exclusively an establishment affair (and even the Church of Scotland, established north of the border, hardly had a mention).
If and when another Coronation became necessary, the Church of England's first thoughts would be to update the 1953 event but leave it basically the same. That will not do. It would hurt the church, but more importantly it would do considerable harm to the incoming monarch. The new Sovereign would be required to swear to uphold "the Protestant Reformed religion", a formula which was substituted for the previous anti-Catholic rant which Edward VII swore but George V refused to. (The Canadians were threatening to boycott the service.) The old oath did not stop George IV being required to agree to Catholic Emancipation in 1829, although he was convinced it was against what he had sworn. And in 1953 the Queen had to swear to "maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England..." Yet she could not refuse to consent to disestablishment if that was what Parliament had decreed. Both having to make such promises, and then having to break them, is profoundly damaging (or very Anglican, depending on how you look at it).
Furthermore, the Coronation traditionally takes the form of a Communion Service in the Anglican rite. This stresses the identification of the sovereign with one section of the population at precisely the moment the emphasis should be on the opposite, on the monarchy as a unifying force in a nation of increasingly diverse religious and cultural traditions. The coronation service, as a state event, has to be secularised, or at least enlarged as a religious event so that it is totally inclusive. If the newly crowned sovereign has personal religious convictions, as indeed one would hope, he or she can express them in a service of the appropriate kind afterwards.
Coronations have a rich history, and there will be a strong arguments put forward that the quasi-sacramental nature of the royal anointing, in particular, should not be lost sight of. But even in 1953, there was a great deal about that service which we now feel as false. Except for the queen herself, virtually every participant was an elderly upper-class white male, either an aristocrat or a senior Anglican prelate. It was not just Catholics who would feel excluded if they ever tried that again. A Coronation that left a large majority of the population thinking "this has nothing to do with me" would probably be the last.
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The question quickly became a blank screen onto which individuals could project whatever grievance or dislike was uppermost in their minds. Muslims were mad, or America was evil. The former answer had appealed to some on the American side of the Atlantic, the latter on this side. That reply, vehement in parts of the left-wing press in Britain, seemed to be tinged with something close to racism - Americophobia, we would have to call it. It shaded into a dislike of globalisation, which was seen to be nothing more than American economic imperialism; or it resulted from an automatic calculation that in every conflict between under-dog and top-dog, the under-dog must be right. Even the Taliban, whose treatment of women differs little from the treatment of blacks in the American Deep South during the worst Jim Crow days, seem to have benefited from this logic. They were being bombed by America, therefore they must be the good guys.
It would have been so much more comfortable to stoke up one's prejudices and agree. But on September 11 Americans were so manifestly the wronged party and Al Qaedar and their Taliban friends and protectors so overwhelmingly the wrong-doers, that any body of thinkers able to entertain the opposite, even if it was the incarnation of the liberal conscience itself, must suffer a severe loss of credibility. You might have thought "blaming the victim" was a right-wing vice. Not when the victims are American, obviously.
The reverse argument - that Muslims are in some sense America's victims, hence the outrageous behaviour of some of them is at least understandable if not exactly excusable - is especially curious as it comes from that direction in the opinion-making firmament which is, in other circumstances, most dismissive of a religion-based world-view. It fails to see what even many Muslims can see, that a great part of what is wrong with the Muslim world is the product of its own faulty belief-system. It is a world that has begun to turn back from the idea that Islam is a religion capable of development, to one that insists it is eternal and changeless. If the world it produces is less than perfect, then that must be someone else's fault.
Thus any society to which the Koran and shuria law are applied as literally as possible must thereby become a good society, what God wants it to be. No allowance can be made for the passage of 1,500 years, nor for the greater knowledge humanity has acquired in that interval, nor for the highly developed societies, of other religious origins than themselves, with which the Muslim world is bordered. And foremost among these illusions is belief in the imminent appearance of the ummah, the mythical "world Muslim nation" dreamt of in the Koran, which will be successful, self-sufficient, accommodate no other ideology, and - by God's design - chief of the entire world.
Muslims who believe in this millennium see that it has not arrived. They see another belief system which is symbolised by America - Western, capitalist, Christian, rich, decadent - standing in the place where, by divine decree, they think the Muslim ummah belongs. They ask what sort of force it is that defies God's will so flagrantly, and decide it must be satanic.
The painful truth that Afghanistan suffered a total catastrophe, the reductio ad absurdum of Islamism, would be more bearable for Muslims if there were plenty of other examples of well-run Muslim states of which to be proud. But where are they? Those that have tried the hardest to make some adjustments to the modern world in the interest of their citizens are those hardest pressed by Islamic fanaticism. None of them have good human rights records. Not one comes even close to being as well organised as an average Western nation. Consider modern secular Turkey's continuing difficulties in measuring up to the requirements of European Union membership.
This is not in principle an anti-Islamic point to make. Others have been in that boat. Is there such a great difference between Osama bin Laden and Oliver Cromwell? Go back 60 years and look at the Catholic world, with its banana republic Latin American dictatorships, its anti-Semitism, its Francos and Mussolinis, its Black Shirts and Brown Shirts, even its Perons and de Valeras. Was there not one decent, open, well-run, democratic Catholic country anywhere? (If anyone says "France", I shall reply "Vichy"!)
What was wrong with Catholicism, that it could only produce corrupt, fascist or dysfunctional societies? The answer was that it was badly in need of updating, which meant a willingness to take into itself insights and inspirations that were not obviously Catholic in their source. It had the doctrine to do so - the belief that the Spirit "bloweth where it listeth", and that God was not constrained by human ideas and institutions - but was fearful of the consequences. Part of the eventual postwar rediscovery of Catholicism was a discovery about God himself: that he was greater than the narrow European Catholic mind could encompass, and that nothing was alien to him, nothing off-limits.
Can modern Islam regain a similar confidence in the greatness of God, similarly recognising that he is not confined to ideas and institutions even when he is their authentic source? Where America is concerned, that means to stop hating and start learning. It is a trick even the British left might one day benefit from.
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The honeymoon eventually ended, as honeymoons do, not least because a relentless media demanded one more tribute to its eternal law, "First we build 'em up, then we knock 'em down." So 1997 was the year of "How long can he keep it up?", and 1998 was when we begun to realise we had after all elected an ordinary mortal. But 1999 was his real time of trial when everything turned pear-shaped. The year of baby Leo and lost sleep was also the year of the WI slow-handclap, and above all of that fatal moment when he faced the cameras at 10 Downing Street, in the midst of the petrol crisis, and gave a very good impression of a man who had lost his grip.
His recovery from that low point, when for the first time since 1992 the Tories were ahead in the opinion polls, was remarkable. He won the 2001 general election very comfortably, with just one net loss from his majority in the House of a Commons. But this time there was no honeymoon and an early return to pear-shape seemed almost inevitable. The British had reluctantly elected someone they did not much like, in preference to someone they strongly disliked (the unfortunate William Hague). The low turn-out was widely seen as disillusionment not just with politics in general but with the black arts of spin, false promises and misleading expectations that had become attached to his reputation, not entirely unfairly. The British electorate was in no mood to make allowances: this time Labour had to walk the walk and no longer just talk the talk. Hardly a single columnist in the national press admitted they could stand Tony Blair, and anyone with shares in the words "self-righteous" and "sanctimonious" would have made a fortune.
Suddenly all is changed, and the Tony Blair we see on our screens is almost a new creation. To some extent this is in us and not in him. It is a platitude to say "nothing will ever be the same" after September 11, and one of the things for ever different is the way we see things. The eyes that saw the Trade Towers collapse now see Tony Blair doing his very damnedest to put things right again. We see him receiving two standing ovations from the entire Congress of the United States. We see him travelling the world to talk to anyone with anything to say, taking risks with his personal dignity and even with his own safety. On his return to Britain he looked shattered, as more than one newspaper loudly announced; but he seems as indefatigable as ever. In the process he has become George Bush's Very Best Friend In The Whole World, more or less, and the Americans are suddenly in love with the Brits just because of him. No sooner does he give a dinner at 10 Downing Street, and the leaders of other European states are quarrelling over which of them has been invited.
Did we misjudge him that much? I suspect the superciliousness of columnists towards Tony Blair was largely because they thought he played a "I'm a straight sort of guy" act which was phoney. Under the pleasant honest exterior, they concluded, was a devious bastard no better than themselves. His pretensions to decency merely compounded the offence, which was why they found him not only contemptible but irritating. There was not much evidence in which to base this low opinion, but politics is about appearances more than it is about realities. In fact, beneath the pleasant honest exterior there is nothing much else than a pleasant honest interior. He believes in himself, true, but if he didn't, why should he expect anyone else to believe in him?
One also got a distinct impression that the press found the prospect of four more years of "Tony the good guy" so unutterably boring, almost any formula was to be preferred. So they took his many virtues - he actually is an upright man - and turned them into vices, accusing him of self-satisfied, sermonising smugness. There is indeed something about his turn of phrase that grates on the ear - he is the sort of man who can never say "the world" but has to say "throughout the whole world." When he really lets go, as he did in his Brighton speech to the Labour Party Conference, his naked ambition to be moral is almost embarrassing. How can anyone be so short of irony? Where is the compulsory English habit of self-mockery?
But this is actually proving the secret of his success. The British are having to take a new look at Mr Blair largely because the Americans, and other foreigners, see him so differently. They like the earnestness, they don't understand irony, and in any case there is a lot to be earnest about (and not much call for irony just now). There is a certain grandeur in someone who so transparently believes in what he is doing that he is prepared to risk looking very silly indeed. A man of destiny, a Churchill or Gladstone, even? Too soon to say, but the very fact the question can be asked marks a radical change. What we have got is not what we thought we were voting for, last June. It is very much more than we thought we were voting for.
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My guess is that not a few of Archbishop Ward's colleagues in the English and Welsh hierarchy felt the same way. They are anxious to get across the message that there has been a fresh start where the handling of child abuse cases is concerned. Nowhere was a fresh start more necessary than in Cardiff.
But all these official positions are undeniably legitimate. It is the suggestion that it was none of the press's business that concerns me. And the reason is that the media and the Catholic church still lack basic agreement about the role of the press in the church's affairs. At best, the relationship is good natured and pragmatic. The church deals with the press because it is there. At worst, it is war. The issue is compounded by the fact that in England there is a tradition of an independent Catholic press that the church authorities cannot control. The decision of the English and Welsh bishops last year to divest themselves of their ownership of The Universe was entirely a step in the right direction, though one noticed that the bishops failed to take credit for what they were doing in these terms. They should have said that they now realised it was wrong - wrong in practice and wrong theologically - for the authorities to control, however obliquely, the means of social communication inside the church.
Those who run or work in the independent Catholic press feel in their bones that what they are doing is right and proper, and good for the church. But they know the church itself does not see it that way. Rather, it sees the Catholic press is an offshoot not of the church itself but of the secular press, with the same secular values. Is it not high time we Christianised this argument, and insisted that the independence of the Catholic press was a fundamental Catholic principle, not an awkward truth the church had to live with?
I was asked by the later Adrian Hastings to write an entry on journalism for his Oxford Companion for Christian Thought which was published last year. To do so I cast around for some theological justification for the role of the press in the affairs of the church, but found virtually none. The situation was no better when I looked for inspiration to the Anglican and Free churches. The nearest I came was Communio e Progressio, a Vatican document of the early 1970s, which showed some evidence that at least the issue was alive in the minds of its authors. So, urged on by Adrian, I had to venture a few thoughts of my own.
The full solution must lie in a theology of the Spirit. It must take seriously Newman's argument that Catholic truth is discovered in a dialectical process between the various parties involved, of which the church hierarchy is only one. But even among those who accept it, the insight is limited to doctrine. The press is not mainly concerned with the shaping of doctrine, but with such issues as leadership and management. And that is where Newman's idea of a dialectical process of debate and disagreement has still not been grasped. The bishop knows best. A good bishop may admit that before he makes up his mind he needs to hear a variety of opinions, take account of what other people think, even allow public debate. But once he has made up his mind, that's an end of it.
The press does not think so. It is not bound by these rules. But that is because the rules are wrong. I am not saying that the values of the Enlightenment or human rights support for freedom of speech should always trump Catholic values. If that was the case, we would have to admit that in places where the Catholic authorities could call all the shots, they would have the right to do so. On the contrary, I believe there is no fundamental disagreement between Enlightenment values and Catholic values in this area. The church vitally needs freedom of speech for its own good, including the freedom to say things the church authorities do not want to hear and to challenge decisions already made, tiresome though that is bound to be. Otherwise it is interfering with the work of the Holy Spirit inside the church, which is, or ought to be, regarded as a seriously culpable sin.
If it does not believe that, then it does not believe the press has the right to the truth. If it does not believe the press has the right to the truth, then it believes the press may, on occasion, be lied to - but always "for the good of the church". Over the years, I have accumulated many such instances. It is time journalists, secular and religious, were able to treat anything said to them by a Catholic representative or spokesman as something said on oath. To use an old category: simple lying may be a venial sin, but perjury is generally mortal. It wounds the person lied to, but even more does it wound the liar. Fatally, in some instance.
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This is a pity, for there is something that still needs to be said about slavery. Probably it needs to be said most of all inside the United States of America (though the British, the chief slave-traders of the 17th and 18th century, need to hear it too). Following the precedent of German reparations for Nazi war crimes, lawyers there have launched class actions designed to win billions of dollars of compensation for the descendants of black slaves from those guilty of enslaving, owning and abusing them. But that is where the difficulty starts. For logic requires that the group plaintiffs in the action are the entire American black community, and the defendants the entire American white community.
Slavery was abolished about 140 years ago with the victory of the north over the south in the American Civil War. Given the mixing up of populations since by movement and marriage, no more precise definition of who are descended from slaves and who from enslavers is ever going to be possible. Provided they are white, even the descendants of those who fought for the north would have to be included.
Hard though it is to imagine such a case ever being resolved in a court of law, and impossible to imagine any justice in any conceivable settlement, there is a certain broad moral insight contained in this approach. It seems the issue of reparations originated in the American black community in the course of some "back to the drawing board" thinking after it became increasingly apparent that affirmative action was doing more harm than good to the cause of racial equality. Affirmative action effectively means permitting discrimination in favour of black and other ethnic minority groups. It was supported when it came in on the grounds that blacks as a group were undeniably the victims of historic injustices, and it was necessary, at least for a while, to be biased in their favour to counteract bias against them in the past.
But this has now become a major cause of racial tension in itself. Belief in fairness, advancement by merit, equality of opportunity, seems to be fundamental to the American creed (even more so than in Britain). Affirmative action contradicted that commitment. At first it was suspected that white people might be objecting to affirmative action as a disguised way of expressing the racial prejudice that was no longer socially acceptable in an overt form. It was just a "white backlash".
A more discerning measurement of public attitudes points to something else. White people objected equally to affirmative action even when other ethnic minorities, not black, were the beneficiaries. And significant numbers of black people also object to affirmative action for precisely the same reason that white people gave - because of the deeply held principle that job appointments and promotions ought to be on merit. It is, incidentally, precisely for that reason that affirmative action is unlawful in Britain.
But affirmative action sprung from the same evidence on the ground that the argument for reparations springs from now - the obstinate persistence of the social phenomenon of black disadvantage. As an ethnic and socio-economic group, American blacks have not benefited from the otherwise familiar pattern that has seen other minority groups start off at the bottom, and soon start to prosper and disperse, so that after a generation they are starting to merge with the average.
In socio-economic terms, relatively recent immigrant groups like the Hispanics (Latin Americans) and what the Americans call Asians (mainly from the Far East) have, despite prejudice against them, leap-frogged the black community and made progress where blacks have not. This is not to deny that some blacks have bucked the trend. But people have noticed that some of the most successful blacks in America have not been descendants of slaves from the Deep South, but more recent arrivals from Africa or the West Indies (General Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, is one obvious example.) So the question arises: is there something inherent in the situation of the great majority of blacks in the United States that causes this failure to thrive? And if it is not the racial prejudice of present day Americans, could it then be a residual historical legacy of the days of slavery? And if so, how is that to be corrected?
Reparations - in effect, damages - are not the answer, partly because money cannot begin to compensate for the wrong done and partly because that would commit the further injustice of holding present-day generations responsible for the crimes of their forefathers. You cannot correct a wrong with another wrong: it isn't right and it doesn't work. Nevertheless it is arguable that those whose ancestors suffered as slaves have inherited some sort of hidden burden - whether moral, psychological, emotional or spiritual it is very hard to say. And they cannot shake it off. Morally they are owed a debt, even if in the real world there seems to be no practical way of satisfying it. Perhaps, after all, an apology is not such an empty gesture. "American Undivided!" is the message on the stickers people have started putting on the fenders of their automobiles, post September 11. One can imagine black Americans thinking that was taking just a little bit too much for granted.
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Terrorism on this scale may be understood as an act of war. But it also falls within the realm of criminal justice. One of the cardinal's key points was that "legal remedies are not to be reduced to considerations of retribution and punishment. They must be directed towards the ultimate goals of justice, reconciliation and healing." This sets "retribution and punishment" in opposition to "reconciliation and healing", and the term "reduced to" makes it clear which way he inclines. But punishment is a legitimate aim of justice. If individual terrorists are eventually convicted, the sentence imposed may indeed have an element designed to bring about reconciliation and healing. But it will mainly be about punishment. Is Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor telling us that that would be wrong?
We may suppose the point of his remark is not to challenge the entire basis of the criminal justice system (as applied to terrorism or any other crime), but to warn against notions of revenge. For that is the logic of his next principle, proportionality. Whatever is done should be calculated to achieve the effective restraint of the evil in question, but not to go beyond that. This is a key principle, he adds, in the light of the destructive power of modern weapons.
The argument is obviously right if it means we cannot exact suffering from innocent Afghanis in retribution for the suffering of innocent Americans. Nor, except as a bluff, can we tell their rulers that we will kill large numbers of their citizens unless they do what we want. (The morality of bluffing was never completely resolved in connection with nuclear deterrence in the Cold War - oh happy days!). But there is little sign that that is what the West intends. That does not mean that a large amount of suffering by innocent Afghanis must, a priori, be ruled out, but that it must by ruled out as a war aim. Indeed, it is fairly clear that a large amount of suffering is more or less inevitable for that unhappy people, if not from military action then from hunger. We may also suppose that a large amount of suffering is pretty likely in the West too, from further acts of mass terrorism.
Proportionality is a central concept of conventional just war theory. Under the principle of double effect, for instance, it may be justified to shell or bomb an enemy position even though there may be civilian casualties as a result. But shooting off rounds that unintentionally kill civilians would not be justified simply to demonstrate to a visiting brass hat that the gunners are keen and up to scratch.
But terrorism undermines the whole concept of proportionality - indeed, it is designed to. On September 11 some 20 hijackers killed more than 6,000 people*. We may assume that they would just as happily have killed 60,000, or even 60,000 each. They are not measuring the number of casualties against their objectives. So do we base our calculation of what is a proportional response on what they actually achieved, or what they would have achieved if they had had the chance? And if the latter, how do we rate the maximum potential of the al-Qaeda terrorist network as a whole?
Tony Blair has already said that in his view we have to take seriously the possible use of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. We have already seen how two civilian aircraft could be turned into weapons of mass destruction. As the collapse of the towers of the World Trade Center was surely the intended result of flying aircraft into the side of them, Mr Blair was hardly overstating the danger. Hence the only "proportionate response" to such an unlimited threat is an unlimited response, or at least one that is only limited at the point at which it succeeds in all its objectives.
Finally, the cardinal shares the conventional wisdom that the "causes of violence" lie in the "context from which they came", namely in gross economic, social and political inequalities (for which, though he does not say so explicitly, the United States must share some of the blame). But the origins of al-Qaeda are quite different. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, decided to wage total terrorist war against the United States because it had set up military bases on the sacred Islamic soil of Saudi Arabia (in order to protect Kuwait from further attack by Saddam Hussein), not because it was the source of social injustice in the world. His declared ultimate goal is not the elimination of that injustice, nor even of injustices to Palestinians at the hands of American-backed Israel, but the establishment of a universal Caliphate for the Muslim world by force, followed by the eventual elimination, by all-out holy war, of Christianity and Judaism (or perhaps should one say "of Christians and Jews"?). At which point, I fear, conventional just war theory starts to buckle under a load it cannot carry. We really are in a new world.
* The official estimate has since been revised to half that number
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So it was that we saw it happen live on television: the gradual unfolding of the worst terrorist attack the world has ever seen. It got worse. Yet another airliner had crashed in Washington - on the Pentagon, we were soon informed - and one more still, somewhere near Pittsburg. Soon one Trade Center tower suddenly collapsed, billowing flame and smoke, dust and debris. And then the other. We were watching people die before our eyes, probably in their hundreds, conceivably in their thousands, perhaps some we knew. Faced with the remorseless of it, prayer seemed irrelevant. Later, still shocked, my wife worked the phones to friends and relations. We were a little bit of Manhattan in Kent, pulling all the strings of solidarity and shared identity just like New Yorkers everywhere, in their city and round the world.
It was their special shock; as an Englishman, all I could offer was the deep sympathy of Londoners, recalling 1940 and the blitz (which I am told I slept through soundly). Later still a friend emailed us from Manhattan to say she and her husband were safe - we had all had lunch together not too long ago - but he had been in the building at the time of the attack. It will take him a long time to forget the sight of bodies falling from the upper floors, all in the morning sunshine. We saw some too, live on tv, no doubt just as the perpetrators intended we should.
In London, too, everybody had had their blitz story, horror seen, horror endured, horror eventually overcome. Cities are hugely resilient, and New York is no exception. They can take almost unimaginable pain and suffering, trauma and stress; and next day they are fully functioning (or as fully as they can be.) Indeed it is the special boast of New Yorkers that the weirdest, most awful things may happen in their city and people get on with their lives - "only in New York!" they remark to each other with a certain wry pride. It must have worn a little thin, by Tuesday evening. But when you push New Yorkers, they push back - the harder, the harder. It is a strange but common mistake people make about those who live in cities of thinking that if you inflict enough shock and pain on them they will do what you want. Just as Nazi bombing of British cities strengthened the British people's determination to resist them, so British bombing of German cities kept German morale, and incidentally Germany loyalty to Hitler, much stronger than it would otherwise have been.
London in the blitz is the classic instance: the attacks on New York of last Tuesday would have counted as a very bad night, but no worse than the worst. "Business as usual," some stoic had scrawled on a board outside a ruined shopfront in the East End as the smoke cleared, one of the best - and most poignant - visual jokes of the entire war. There were moments when the civilian population began to have doubts, even to show signs of real panic, but the city itself, its very vastness, had the power to steady nerves. London pulled through. New York will pull through too. It knows it.
What holds cities together is size, identity, solidarity and memory. Size says we can walk a dozen miles and still be on the same streets. Identity says we are proud of where we belong, and no-one will take that from us. Solidarity says we pull together in a crisis, because of who we are. Memory says we look around us and draw strength, not just from the present but from the past.
The solidarity of cities is not merely the moral feeling of all for one and one for all; it is also the massiveness of the structures from which cities are made, solid in the literal sense. Two giant towers are missing from New York's skyline, but anyone who knows Manhattan knows they were a long way south of the centre, the distance from Kensington to Wapping. You could fit the whole of Oxford into the intervening space. Size, as they say, is important to a city. It gives it its ability to soak up any amount of punishment. Again, look at London in 1940, or 1944 when the V1s and V2s started to arrive. Civilian fatalities in the capital by the end of hostilities exceeded 50,000. It survived. Indeed, at the end of the war, even Berlin - by the spring of 1945 probably the most devastated city in earth - continued to function as best it could.
It would be true to say that European cities were hardened by war in a way American cities, at least not since General Sherman "marched through Georgia", have not. That is no longer true of New York. In the long run, when the worst you can imagine actually comes to pass - and you find you can cope - the future loses just that little bit of its menace.
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These thoughts are prompted by the latest booklet from the Institute for the Study of Civil Society called The Uncertain Trumpet, an analysis by left-wing sociologist Norman Dennis of the way Church of England schools came in the course of 50 years to give up on the communication of faith.
Mr Dennis shows how all the established Church's high hopes about the postwar schools settlement, as laid down in the 1944 Education Act, gradually ebbed away. The Church had made generous financial arrangements with the state to ensure the survival of its vast network of schools, mostly primary, and secured its control of the religion taught in them. Under the "agreed syllabus" system, it also acquired a veto over the religion taught in the non-denomination state sector, which, aside from the Catholic system, made up almost all the remainder. Job done, we can almost hear them say to themselves; problem solved. Let's concentrate on something else.
As a result, the Church of England has no means to hand for providing itself with the next generation of members. It all happened more by muddle than by malice. One part of the Church, not knowing what was actually happening in religious education, assumed the Anglican (and even the state) school system was quietly getting on with the task of preparing the next generation of Christians. They saw no reason to continue with Sunday schools. Yet another part of the Church talked ambitiously about including young people in the life of the Church, giving them a greater role in Sunday services and so on. Another part told itself how splendid it was that the Church of England was making such a large contribution to the education of the nation's children, even more worthy because it was untainted by an sectarian motive.
But meanwhile back in the classrooms and training colleges, theories of education were becoming more and more secular. Anglican educationalists climbed on board the bandwagon rather than putting up any resistance, such is the power of intellectual fashion in a profession like teaching. The boo-word was "indoctrination", something that Jesuits (or even Nazis) did to children. From such a standpoint, there was no factual basis to Christianity or indeed any other religious system. It could not therefore be taught as true.
The only way religion could be accommodated into these new ideas, says Mr Dennis, was by turning it into an anthropological phenomenon to be studied comparatively and objectively by teachers who were inhibited from giving even a glimpse of their personal convictions. While geography and mathematics were taught as true - no teacher would dream of telling a class that "some people thought Paris was the capital of France and that two and two made four, but you must make your own mind up" - religion was taught on the basis of "some say this, some say that, take your pick." So "this" was true for you, "that" was true for me; and we had nothing much to say to each other. And the same relativism quickly took over moral teaching (from which the nation's schools seemed to want to withdraw completely).
The surface phenomena of religion - feast and fasts, customs and ceremonies - were divorced from their overall cultural and philosophical context and studied as if they were what really mattered. Points of similarity between Christian ritual and other world religions would be noted, though with a decided tendency to skate over the bits of other faiths that were less attractive (while not concealing the bits of the Christian case that were less than edifying). It was supposed that "empathy" for other people's beliefs could be acquired this way, and that this empathy would lead to tolerance, understanding, and a harmonious multicultural society. Thus did RE acquire a fresh raison d'être for a post-modern world. And in the end, says Mr Dennis, there was very little difference between the attitude towards religion in state schools and the attitude towards religion in C of E schools.
So bye-bye Christianity.
All this predates the Dearing Commission, whose recent report calls at last for a sea-change in the whole Church of England approach to religion in the schools that bear its name. The objective of those schools should in future be to expose pupils to the beliefs, values and ethos of the Church of England - a methodology close to that of the Catholic school system. It would be a little crude to say they were being urged to go back to "teaching Christianity as true", but pupils would certainly be told why the Church of England thinks it's true. The Dearing report, noting the present Government's enthusiasm for the academic success rate of Church schools, proposes that another 100 Anglican secondary schools should be built in the next ten years, remedying a historic gap in provision for that age group.
It will not be easy, but the attempt deserves every success and all the support the parallel Catholic system can offer. That does not necessarily mean joint schools, however, for teaching Catholicism and Anglicanism alongside each other as equally true can quickly turn into teaching them as equally false. "Lowest common denominator" Christianity has been the bane of the English RE scene for 50 years, and it does not work. On the other hand, four out of ten of the top comprehensives in London this summer were Catholic, and a fifth was Anglican. That is an approach that clearly does work.
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It is at first puzzling, therefore, that a Cheshire vicar has made it into the summer headlines by banning Blake's hymn from a wedding because it was "too nationalistic." (The poem commonly called Jerusalem is in fact from Blake's preface to his poem Milton. He gave the actual name to another poem altogether). The best argument in the vicar's favour is the probability that Blake was a little influenced by the so-called British-Israelites, who believed that the Anglo-Saxons were the Lost Tribes of Israel. In America, that view is popular among white-supremacist militia movements, which are certainly "too nationalistic" by half.
A little more intellectually respectable than British-Israelism is New-Israelism, the belief that the Anglo-Saxon peoples (first Britain, then America, or both at once) have taken over from the Jews the status of God's Chosen People. As an idea it has had a profound influence, especially when reading the Bible was the daily duty of every Protestant Christian worthy of the name.
Lloyd George once claimed to know more about the ancient kings of Israel than the modern kings of Britain. A Welsh nonconformist of modest background, he was Biblically rather than classically educated. That is a world-view that puts Jerusalem rather than Athens or Rome at the centre of human history. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Balfour Declaration promising a "Jewish national homeland" was issued by a Government headed by Lloyd George, who took a close interest in these matters. It is a pity one cannot say with more satisfaction - "and look what that led to." Jerusalem, a city that has suffered so much in three thousand years, is once more synonymous with suffering and loss.
Throughout their 2,000-year diaspora, Jews used to bless each other with the wish "Next year, in Jerusalem." It was a messianic or eschatological hope: the early Zionists were repudiated by their Jewish co-religionists precisely because they were proposing to achieve by political means something best left in the hands of God. Lloyd George, naturally, was happy to have it both ways, believing Britain had been chosen to fulfil part of the divine plan for the Jews. The fact that according to a Welsh nonconformist the next stage of the divine plan would involve the conversion of Jews to Christianity makes Lloyd George a somewhat ambiguous hero in Zionist eyes.
The Jerusalem that has long been the mystical religious capital of world Christianity was never a physical place on a map. It was an idea, a heavenly city on a hill. Thus Queen Elizabeth II's coronation service in 1953 begun with an anthem based on Psalm 122: "Our feet shall stand in thy gates: O Jerusalem. Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity in itself. O pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee." Such ideas occur repeatedly in Christian liturgy - so often, in fact, that we have stopped noticing them.
This use of Jerusalem as a metaphor for the Kingdom of God, a vision of a post-millennial perfect society, dates from before Christ. But it was not just a hope: it also conveyed a sense of loss and of yearning. This is the mood of Psalm 137 (best captured in the words of the Authorised Version): "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion... How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning."
The New Testament idea of Jerusalem is not without this sense of longing but directed more to the future, as in the Apocalypse: "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband."(AV) The Church was quick to appropriate this image of a heavenly Jerusalem to herself, and, believing that the old covenant between God and the Jews was ended, took over as the new Chosen People.
But just as identifying the Chosen People with the white race can lead to racism - if whites are chosen then blacks are implicitly inferior and rejected - so identifying the Chosen People with the Catholic Church can lead to anti-Semitism - the belief that Christians are chosen and Jews are inferior and rejected. Indeed, identifying the Chosen People with the Anglo-Saxons can lead to the view that foreigners are inferior and rejected; and identifying the Jews as the Chosen People can lead to the idea that Palestinians are inferior and rejected. It is a very two-edged weapon. Alongside Jerusalem - a vision of the best that might be possible - is another Jerusalem, a dangerous idea easily misused. There is no doubt which one Blake intended. But what about the rest of us?
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His three examples were Charles Kennedy of the Liberal Democrats, a Highland Scot whose faith is presumably therefore "of his fathers"; Iain Duncan Smith, who carries the right-wing banner into the Tory leadership battle this autumn; and Tony Blair himself, who has several times been rumoured to be a potential convert and who regularly worships alongside his Catholic wife and children. Nor are these the only political Catholics recently under the media spotlight. Three out of five of the original official contenders in the Tory race were either practising Catholics or, as Michael (Francis Xavier) Portillo boldly volunteered on television, raised in it. Michael Ancram, the third of them, is ex-Ampleforth and married into the Duke of Norfolk's family.
Lord Hattersley's principle cause of alarm was that practising Catholics heading British political parties might try to translate their religious beliefs into legislation - meaning, one may suppose, that they might want to tighten the law on abortion. Why do left-wing Guardian-type commentators always reduce Catholic moral teaching to that one issue? This preoccupation blinds them to the point, for instance, that if Iain Duncan Smith was really determined to apply the pro-life teachings of his Church to his politics, he would oppose capital punishment rather than, as he does, advocate its return. Similarly it overlooks the fact that Mr Blair was acting entirely in line with his Catholic sympathies when he introduced rights to trade union recognition and a minimum wage, measures Lord Hattersley would surely approve of. And is not Catholic teaching on the common good something he would wish to see "imposed on party policy", rather than its opposite?
Nevertheless it does seem as if the participation of Catholics in public life, so long such a highly emotive subject, has lost its charge. This has happened quite suddenly. When a Catholic was appointed Director General of the BBC in the 1960s, there was a real possibility the Government might have blocked the move on religious and constitutional grounds. Not long after, when the law was changed to remove the bar on the Lord Chancellor being a Catholic, it was said the Prime Minister could never be one. Even five years ago, it seemed most unlikely that a Catholic would ever be made Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, though with the appointment of John Reid, that is now the case. Indeed, at least on this side of the Irish Sea there was almost no comment about it.
So what has happened to anti-Catholic prejudice, for so long such a defining characteristic of English public life? It may not be entirely irrelevant that when I recently wanted a copy of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, the bookshop had to order it from America and it took a while to arrive. It seems to have vanished from the land, though I don't doubt there is a copy or two floating about in Northern Ireland. Foxe's vivid chronicle of the cruelties of persecution of Protestants under Mary Tudor in the middle of the 16th century was once reckoned, apart from the Bible, to be the only book to be found in the great majority of British households. Of all the measures taken to swing the public's sympathy against Catholicism, it was the most successful. It became a best seller again in the 18th century, to frighten people once more about the dangers of a Jacobite restoration. Above all it was Foxe who created the enduring belief among the British that Catholicism was the instrument of tyranny and the enemy of liberty.
And having dipped into its pages, I can see just how frightened they must have been. The Catholic Church is depicted as being consumed with lust for the blood of pious Protestants, its agents consigning hundreds of brave martyrs to the flames with true psychopathic relish. Foxe collected fresh eye-witness accounts in the most gruesome detail, and applied his imagination vigorously. Almost invariably, he depicts the victims going to their death with saintly composure, their persecutors missing no chance to add extra cruelties and indignities up to the last minute. Equally invariably, the large crowds of people who watched the burnings are depicted as on the side of the victims.
Given that these executions would hardly have been possible without a good deal of public support - there is little evidence of spectators posing threats to public order, for instance - that must surely be more propaganda than historical reality. But it is easy to see, once Foxe' book was widely read, why public sympathy turned and Catholics came to be hated and feared - by the very people who had, not long before, hated Protestants. Before we Catholics get too smug about our being restored to a place in the sun - if that is what leading a political party amounts to - it might be good for our humility to get just a sniff of Smithfield from the pages of Foxe's Book. It is a salutary lesson. Now Protestants do not seem to be reading it any more, perhaps Catholics should.
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But the story he wrote for publication was rather different from the story he had told me. There had been "incidents", leading to "arrests", which were described in the language of police and government spokesmen. There was little sign of the wholesale police misconduct he had witnessed, expect for a passing reference to a complaint from a nationalist politician. When I complained at his omissions, he tactfully told me over the phone what I was obviously too inexperienced to know: that "we don't report these things... always best to stick to the official line... this isn't England..." and so on. This was my initiation into the generation-old journalistic tradition of not telling our readers the truth about Northern Ireland.
All this came back to me when I was listening last week to the editor of the Oldham Telegraph explaining on BBC Radio 4 how he and his staff had been caught on the hop by the recent rioting in that town. They had no Asian reporters, indeed had never even had an application from one, and there was little contact with the Asian community. When the fuse blew, therefore, they did not even know where to look for the fuse box. Both the rioting and the increasing levels of street violence in the proceeding weeks had been reported by them according to the usual conventions. Asian youths were misbehaving: the police were cracking down on them. Meanwhile an Asian contributor to the programme was heard complaining that his community felt it had little access to the local press, and in any case did not trust it. The editor had the grace to admit he had to do better than this in future.
Lack of trust and lack of access go together. Just as British newspapers must have looked to Northern Irish Catholics as incorrigibly pro-establishment and pro-Protestant, so local papers in England's northern towns must look to their Asian communities as incorrigibly pro-establishment and white. Such newspapers did not know a time bomb was ticking away in their midst until it exploded. The fact that the police and other organs of local and national government were just as much in the dark is no real excuse.
This media malaise of lack of access and lack of trust was one of the central themes that emerged from a symposium on "public life and the mass media" which was held two weeks ago under the auspices of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales at St Mary's College, Strawberry Hill. Most participants were Catholics active in their local community, some on a church basis, some secular. The symposium was called to address a pressing concern that emerged from the "Catholics in Public Life" conference in Liverpool last year.
It fell to me to sum up at the end. It was easy to sense that the press were not trusted, indeed were thought to be quite dangerous. If journalists operated according to professional standards and ethical codes, it was not obvious from the outside. But the press were also seen to be essential. To put it at its least - unless accurate information was available to the press from reliable sources, they would get things even more wrong and that would be even more damaging.
One also readily sensed that many people felt disempowered. That pointed in two directions. On the one hand lay Catholics over a certain age have not yet fully shaken off ideas such as that lay men or women were amateur or second-class Catholics whose main duty was to keep their heads below the parapet. People still somehow felt that only a priest (or better still a bishop) could authentically speak up for the Catholic community. Lay people who tried to do so were talking out of turn or even likely to be branded as troublemakers.
But the disempowerment also applied to dealing with the press itself. It may be essential, but how did it work and what were its rules? How, at its most basic, do you go about getting a story into a local newspaper or put out by a local radio station? Who writes the headlines? Can you expect a reporter to read his copy back? How, when necessary, do you complain? What does "off the record" mean? And so on.
There is obviously a great deal more work to be done by the Catholic Media Office (or its successor when it is soon reorganised). Courses are available: there is also scope for a good pamphlet, a handy "layman's guide to good press relations". But to refuse to join in would be to invite exclusion, indeed to exclude oneself. It would be to separate oneself from the common good of the local community.
There may be risks attached, but the church must bear them. The press, believe it or not, likes to get things right. Journalists and broadcasters are delighted to deal with people who know what they are doing but quickly back off if met by obstruction, evasion and suspicion. Lack of access and lack of trust work both ways. And I am glad to say, most of those taking part in the symposium were aware of it. Slowly, we are getting there.
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Obscure as it at first sounds, this chicken-and-egg question lies behind the one great unresolved issue at the heart of modern Catholicism, not least in its relations with other churches. As head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger's position is that the universal church came first, and as the papacy is of the essence of the universal church, then the papacy came first too.
This is more than just a question of historical sequence. It affects the way the church's fundamental design is understood. It places the papacy in charge of the church. Because they came after the universal church, the local churches, each led by its own bishop, are subordinate to the papacy. For all sorts of things they might want to do - indeed, believe in all conscience they ought to do - they need Rome's permission first. It is often not forthcoming.
However politely they have been conducted, ecumenical conversations with other Christian churches have had on the Catholic side the barely concealed agenda of restoring this papal priority. Perhaps it was to be wielded gently, a benign universal primacy such as that conceived by the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission, for instance. Before important decisions were taken, other bishops were to be asked synodically what they thought. But Rome was where the buck stopped. In the end, Rome knows best.
It is all the more dramatic, therefore, that a serious challenge to this theory of church structure has been mounted not from some progressive academic campus but by the head of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity - down the curial corridor from Cardinal Ratzinger, so to speak. Cardinal Kasper, said by those who know him to be a better theologian even than Ratzinger, has challenged the basic Ratzinger proposition that the universal church came first. And he did so just before the Pope appointed him last year to his new, absolutely crucial, position in the Vatican. His promotion is unlikely to have been a mistake. His star is rising, as Ratzinger's is fading.
It would be surprising if the pope himself has finally begun to question the Ratzinger position. But he is a pope of surprises. He must be aware that it is the fundamental road block to ecumenical progress, especially with his Slav brothers in the Eastern Orthodox. He may be remembering that what was decided at Vatican II - he was there - was meant to clip the Roman Curia's wings once and for all, precisely what has not happened. He may have noticed that many middle of the road cardinals, archbishops and bishops he has appointed in his 23 years as pontiff are increasingly restive on this very issue. And that the Vatican has gradually become more and more isolated.
The latest instalment of Cardinal Kasper's argument with Cardinal Ratzinger originally appeared in a German theological magazine. When an English interpretation appeared in America, provided by Professor Ladislas Orsy SJ of Georgetown University Law Centre, Washington DC, some of the remarks attributed to Cardinal Kasper were publicly challenged by Cardinal Avery Dulles SJ as having been embroidered in translation. So The Tablet, because of the importance of knowing exactly what Cardinal Kasper was saying, commissioned its own more literal translation from Robert Nowell.
Now Professor Orsy has joined the debate himself (current edition of The Tablet,) arguing that the Vatican curia's behaviour since the end of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 has largely nullified what was intended to be the Council's most important doctrinal achievement, its theory of collegiality.
This nicely dovetails with the Kasper analysis. Both of them point to the urgent need to reinforce the weight given to the local churches, in the internal affairs of each of them and in the government of the church regionally and as a whole. And this is not just for the sake of good will but because it is necessary in order to respect the inalienable rights and responsibilities of local bishops. They are not delegates of Rome. They are empowered directly by their sacramental orders. Collegiality comes from Christ, not from the dispensations of the curia. And a church without papacy and collegiality is unbalanced.
The priority of the universal over the local has been a characteristic of the Latin church for a millennium, ever since the Latin Patriachate (based in Rome) lost the counter-weight of the Greek patriarchs (based in Constantinople and elsewhere) after the Great Schism of 1054. Cardinal Kasper has thrown back at Cardinal Ratzinger his famous (but famously ignored) principle, enunciated in 1976, that "what was possible within Christianity for 1,000 years cannot be impossible today. Rome must not demand of the East more with regard to the doctrine of primacy than was defined and lived in the first millennium".
That puts a very big question mark against the First Vatican Council's 1870 definition of papal infallibility and universal jurisdiction, not to mention the papally defined dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and Assumption and a good deal of Roman doctrine since. Their binding character hangs from the same doctrine of papal primacy. The Orthodoxy cannot be asked to submit to them as a condition of full communion, Ratzinger was clearly saying in 1976 - and Kasper was repeating with approval only a few months ago. If "the East" cannot be, then surely Anglicans cannot, either.
And why stop there?
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There is another national organisation that faces a similar danger. The Catholic Church's official mind has not been able to move much beyond the 1950s because there has been a theological vacuum in the whole area of sexuality and marriage. As a result, many priests no longer write down what they think about these subjects. They just do what they feel is right, and hope to avoid a fuss.
A public that is becoming increasingly tolerant of homosexuality will be increasingly irritated by public institutions that have failed to make the same adjustment. But what matters even more is the massive slide away from marriage as the normal institutional context for regular sexual relations and, increasingly, for the rearing of children.
This is Mr Heseltine's "40 per cent of the population". The Catholic Church has found little good to say about this almost certainly irreversible slide, which is happening as much within its own ranks as outside them. So common has it become for couples presenting themselves for marriage to be already living at the same address, many priests say they are are little sceptical (and suspect a polite fib) when they meet couples who claim they haven't started sleeping together. The same situation applies when parents ask for their children to be baptised. What proportion of Catholic christenings happen to couples who are not formally wed? Is it unrealistic to guess that that figure, too, is 40 per cent?
There is a major pastoral crisis here for the Catholic Church, and just as in the case of abortion, it does not look as if the bishops have a coherent strategy to meet it. To say that is not to challenge the fundamentals of the Church's teaching. It is more a plea for some lateral thinking.
For instance what are they going to say about a Bill soon to be going through Parliament which aims to give to unmarried fathers similar rights to access and control of their children as the law presently gives to married fathers. It will be one of a series of changes, both through legislation and through the courts, that have blurred the distinction between the married and the unmarried state. Other lines of convergence have occurred over tax, social security entitlements, ownership of joint property, residence, violence, even the law of rape. The traditional answer, certainly from the Tory right, has been that if couples want the protections and benefits of marriage, they should marry. For those who choose not to, nothing should be done. The law has been far more pragmatic. On various occasions, having seen a wrong, it has acted expediently to put it right. But if the law gradually extends similar rights and protections to unmarried partners as to the married, there is gradually less and less incentive to marry.
But we may be misreading the situation. It is possible that what we are witnessing is the gradual reinvention of common law marriage, marriage in its raw and natural condition before church and state tried to regulate it. If that is the case, then the blurring of the distinction between marriage and non-marriage is actually a movement in favour of marriage. We are unfortunately hung up on terminology, because society uses "marriage" to refer only to relationships that have been legally and ceremonially formalised, a usage that would have been incomprehensible in Biblical times.
We are drifting, in fact, back to the situation before 1563. That was when the Council of Trent's decree Tametsi refused to recognise any marriage not performed according to the canonical norms (greatly strengthened by the decree ne Temere of 1908). A similar move for similar reasons was achieved in England by the Marriage Act of 1753. As the late Adrian Hastings pointed out in his Christian Marriage in Africa in 1973, a lot of what has gone wrong in Africa stems from the inappropriate application of these European norms to very different societies. And modern European society, three or four centuries on, is no less different.
Neither decision was popular at the time, and despite fierce clerical disapproval - expressed by the denunciation of such people as "living in sin" and by draconian bastardy laws - common law or "customary" marriage took a long time to die out. (In Scotland it never did). What we are witnessing is quite possibly not the unravelling of marriage as such but the unravelling of attempts, notably in 1563, 1753 and 1908, to impose a pattern on it that human nature does not find comfortable, and in fact never did.
Indeed, some bishops at the Council of Trent warned that the Church would come to regret what they attacked as an unwarranted restriction on human freedom. That has strong contemporary resonances. It has taken a long time for the 16th century critics of the Tridentine decree Tametsi to begin to be proved right, but it increasingly looks as if they were. And if that is so, the Catholic Church's whole policy on marriage needs considerable rethinking.