Where I disagree with the International Development Secretary is in her bull-in-a-china-shop approach, as if the hard men in the Vatican are going to soften their line just because she has bashed them on the BBC. It was self-indulgent of her, and unhelpful. The way to win this one is not to polarise it, not to turn it into a "we" versus "they" thing. There are many people inside the Catholic Church who not only want to see a change, but have some chance of bringing one about.

For this to happen, the climate has to be favourable. The "official" Church must be wooed into being less defensive, brought into the open, engaged in dialogue, and persuaded. There is in fact a growing consensus among theologians of international standing that the Catholic Church could be brought round to the use of condoms in the fight against Aids - without it having to shift its position on the underlying principles one iota. And given the conservative regime in the Vatican under the present Pope, that is the only method likely to work.

On the other hand if they think the only way to defend those basic principles is to stand by the ban on condoms however useful they might be in combating Aids, then they will not shift. No matter how scathing Clare Short is about them, no matter how many thousands of Aids-orphaned children make it to our television screens.

Official Catholic voices in France, Brazil, the United States, even Scotland, have in the last few years already adopted a nuanced pro-condom position, though sometimes running into opposition. A collection of essays just published in the United Kingdom, Catholic Ethicists on HIV/Aids Prevention (Continuum £15.99) shows this thinking is gaining ground rapidly all over the world. More than 30 international authors, including one of Britain's most distinguished moral theologians, Kevin Kelly, present an overwhelming case for condoms to be part of an integral and well co-ordinated public health programme to stop the spread of HIV.

Father Kelly asks: "Granted the scientifically established capacity of good quality condoms, properly used, to diminish considerably the risk of HIV infection, would not condom use be more accurately described, from the moral perspective, as life-preserving rather than life-preventing, pro-life rather than anti-life?" This is the kind of language the Vatican understands, and putting it as a question makes it even less confrontational.

But first the book nails the misinformation, much relied upon by Catholic spokesman in the past, that condoms are too unreliable to be useful in Aids prevention. For instance recent research reported in the New England Journal of Medicine showed not one case of HIV transmission among a group of 124 couples, one infected, one not, who used condoms in approximately 15,000 separate acts of sexual intercourse. And field studies in Uganda and Thailand have shown a direct connection between condom use and reductions in HIV cases.

What is remarkable about this collection is that several of the authors accept without question the truth of the 1968 papal encyclical against birth control, Humanae Vitae, which is the basis of the Church's opposition to using condoms to prevent the spread of Aids. Usually, Catholics who think condoms should be used against Aids think they are legitimate as contraceptives too. That is my view. These conservative theologians disagree, but still rely upon a conventional and wholly orthodox principle of Catholic moral theology to justify the use of condoms.

They argue by analogy, for instance, that the church is against people getting drunk. But if a priest offers to drive a drunk driver home, that is an attempt to limit the evil to the one sin of drunkenness, avoiding the far more serious evil of killing or injuring others. It does not mean he is condoning getting drunk in the first place.

An ever better parallel is with the supply of clean needles to drug addicts, a controversial public health tactic here and in America. It would clearly be immoral as well as illegal to encourage the use of heroin. But if addicts are going to inject anyway, health workers say it is better to discourage them sharing and reusing old needles by offering a free supply of new ones. And if that is an effective way of cutting down on the spread of Aids and other diseases among heroin addicts, how does that differ from trying to persuade prostitutes to use condoms? It does not condone the prostitution any more than supplying free needles condones the drug-taking. It merely limits the damage.

When the British Government unveiled its anti-Aids public health programme in 1987, based on the fairly explicit (and highly melodramatic) promotion of safe sex practices, Cardinal Hume was asked by a reporter if he "regretted" the Government's reliance on condoms. He replied in his characteristically feline way: "I regret that it is thought necessary." Since then there has been tacit consent among English Catholics to whatever measures the Government saw fit to use in protecting the public from an Aids epidemic. And they seem to have worked.

This tacit consent of Catholic leaders to safe-sex public health programmes has been the pattern in many parts of the world. The impression given by Clare Short is not entirely true, therefore; and often, as she failed to mention, Catholic nuns and priests are prominent among those working selflessly in the front line to care for the victims of Aids (and, in huge numbers, their orphaned children.) There are hundreds of unsung Mother Teresas at work in the slums and shanty towns of Harare or Cape Town. That fact belongs in the equation too.

There is another legitimate theological argument in favour of condoms which seems even more unanswerable - using the so-called principle of double effect. If a husband infected with Aids through a blood transfusion, say, has intercourse with his wife, he is threatening her life if he does not use a condom. He is not doing so to prevent conception; he may even regret that the condom has that side-effect.

But his semen contains an inextricable mixture of spermatozoa, whose journey to the Fallopian tube it is wrong (according to Humanae Vitae) deliberately to interrupt; and particles of HIV virus, the agent of an incurable and deadly disease which must be interrupted at all cost. In order to interrupt the latter it is inevitable, as a foreseeable but unintended consequence, that you also interrupt the former. This, under the principle of double effect, is allowable.

It is the same principle that says that a pilot is not guilty of murder if the foreseeable but unintended consequence of his bombing a military target is the death of innocent civilians. And indeed the same principle offers doctors a defence to murder in English law. Under double-effect, they are not guilty of homicide if they unintentionally bring about the death of incurably ill patients by administering ever higher doses of a pain killer, even if they know death is likely.

Sooner or later I believe the Catholic Church will change its position on contraception, and back out of the unfortunate moral cul de sec it entered with the publication of Humanae Vitae in 1968. But that day will not come quickly, and Aids is happening now. Even with Humanae Vitae still in force, however, there are plenty of ways of getting the Catholic Church off the hook.

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LAYLINES
by Clifford Longley

The Tablet JULY 15 2000

Strasbourg in the High Street

IT HAS BEEN SAID the word "rights" does not appear in the index of the average English legal textbook. The criminal law proceeds by laying down that specific conduct incurs a specific penalty or remedy. It makes no moral judgement, offers no statement of general principles.

All this is about to change with the implementation at the beginning of October of the Human Rights Act in England and Wales. For more than a generation, the incompatibility between the English legal system and the philosophical framework of the European Convention of Human Rights was given as the reason why it could not be incorporated into English law. We are about to see how true this objection was. As one of the 30,000 lay Justices of the Peace in England and Wales, I have recently taken part in the compulsory training that the Lord Chancellor has decreed all magistrates must undergo before the Act comes into force.

"A new way of thinking" is how it was billed. That reflects a lawyer's outlook. "A Strasbourg in every High Street" would be nearer the mark as far as the average citizen is concerned. In the past, an individual who thought one of his rights under the convention had been breached had to wait until the very end of the English judicial process, including exhausting all appeals, before he could even raise the point - and then he had to travel to Strasbourg to do so, with the delay, expense and uncertainty that entailed.

Under the new dispensation the point may be raised when the case first comes before the local magistrates. Even if it is not raised in court by advocates, the bench itself, advised by its clerk, must deal with it. This is the first time that English courts have been given a pro-active role of this kind. Traditionally they arbitrate between two positions (with the benefit of any doubt going to the defence), and if something isn't put in front of them by one side or the other, they do not usually take it into account.

The magistrates' training programme was complicated and much of it was technical. We had to grasp the theoretical difference, for instance, between a limited right (Articles 2,4(2),5 and 6) and a qualified right (Articles 8,9,10 and 11). A qualified right may be restricted by law only to the extent that is necessary to secure a legitimate aim, and the court has to decide whether the restriction is proportional to the aim in question. Thus a political demonstration is an exercise of the qualified right to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression. The police may restrict the scale and nature of a demonstration, but it will be for the courts to say whether they have done so only to the extent necessary. One strongly suspects that many of those arrested for demonstrating during the visit of the Chinese President last year, for instance, had their rights restricted beyond what was proportional. In other words their arrests could have been declared illegal under the Human Rights Act, and the case against them dismissed on that ground (with compensation).

It is true that many of the protections given by the Human Rights Act are already implicit in the way the law works, though differently expressed. And for the 50 years that Britain has been a signatory to the European Convention, any procedure that was blatantly out of step with Article 6, say, (the right to a fair trial) could have been taken to Strasbourg and declared incompatible. New laws are routinely surveyed while passing through Parliament to see whether they comply with the convention, though Governments sometimes take an optimistic view of what the convention will allow. There are still plenty of areas where established practices followed by police, prosecutors or the courts could fall foul of the Human Rights Act. In that case magistrates may be called upon to say so, possibly throwing cases out on grounds hitherto unknown to the law. It is uncharted territory, and as the due date approaches, one detects a certain apprehension among those who operate the system at what may happen.

The lay magistracy is very unusual, one of the unsung glories of the legal system. Britain is the only country in Europe which uses non-lawyer volunteers to act as unpaid judges to deal with the vast majority of criminal cases. But hitherto the public perception of JPs has tended to see them as part of a system for enforcing the law against the citizen, not as part of a system for protecting the citizen against abuses of that law.

All that is about to change. The Human Rights Act gives rights to ordinary people that can be claimed in the ordinary courts. It empowers them, and hence in subtle but significant ways it changes the very nature of citizenship. As lay magistrates become the chief protectors of those rights, it will subtly but significantly change the nature of what they do too: and thus, in due course, how they are perceived.

Hence it is very important that they should be continue to be lay people and not lawyers (one cannot write "laymen" as half of all magistrates are female, perhaps the only area of public life where this ideal balance has already been achieved). There are repeated rumours that the Government would like to replace lay magistrates with a full-time stipendiary system, which it is sometimes said would be cheaper or quicker, or whatever. But it is because of the lay magistracy that we may rightly claim that justice in England and Wales is administered by the people for the people. Where else in the world is that true, and is it not something to be proud of?

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph JULY 14 2000

When the zigzag has to stop

THERE IS ONE THING COMMON to every Archbishop of Canterbury since the war: they would not have recommended their immediate successor. In looking round for someone to succeed the present incumbent, one way of narrowing the field is to ask "Who would George Carey least want to be followed by?" And that points straight to Richard Chartres, Bishop of London (who was once Robert Runcie's domestic chaplain).

Geoffrey Fisher would certainly not have been William Temple's choice. One was a social conservative, bothered by the private morals of public figures, and the other a social liberal and one of the fathers of the Welfare State. When the time came, Fisher did not think highly of Michael Ramsey's leadership and caused much ecclesiastical embarrassment during his retirement by writing regularly to the papers to say so.

Ramsey in his turn was shocked by the plotting that surrounded the appointment of Donald Coggan, and said privately that it was the strongest argument for disestablishment he had ever heard. He also muttered about Coggan after the launch of his much vaunted Call to the Nation, saying "I always knew Donald had nothing to say but didn't realise he would say it so badly."

Coggan behaved properly towards his successor, Robert Runcie, promising not to be like Fisher and write to the newspapers - which implies he was tempted to. They were chalk and cheese, the earnest headmaster and the slightly dandyish college principal. And before George Carey was appointed, Runcie wanted to be succeeded by John Habgood, Archbishop of York, like him a member of the Westcott/Cuddesdon set and a liberal Anglo-Catholic. The 102nd Archbishop of Canterbury was never a bosom pal of the bishop of Bath and Wells, who was a working class Evangelical and moved in entirely different circles.

The list of Archbishops during and since the war - Temple (appointed 1942), Fisher (1945), Ramsey (1961), Coggan (1974), Runcie (1980) and Carey (1991) - also reveals the enduring power of cricket in the business of church and state. They are, alternately, Low Church and High, (which nowadays we would call Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic). This reveals a habitual tendency in 10 Downing Street to "let the other chaps have a turn at the wicket" when the time comes. I have actually heard that expression used. Anglicanism, so to speak, is a game of two halves.

There is no secret note handed down from prime minister to prime minister (signed by Gladstone and Disraeli, perhaps) to say it had to be played like that. But the result is that the Church of England has not had consistent leadership. Each Archbishop of Canterbury spends a great deal of his time at the crease putting right what he regards as the mistakes of his predecessor. They were not necessarily real mistakes, just the result of a different way of seeing the world and the Church's place in it. These churchmanship labels also correspond to personality types: there is a definite resemblance between Fisher, Coggan and Carey (the Roundheads) as there is between Temple, Ramsey and Runcie (the Cavaliers).

So the truth about "Anglican comprehensiveness", of High and Low Church under one roof, is this zigzagging at the top. It gives the lie to the argument that leaving the appointment in political hands somehow lifts it above church politics. It actually becomes captive to church politics, but with the guarantee that there will be no enduring winner and hence no long-term stability. With the Church of England facing ever more serious problems, that is a recipe for disaster.

There is no formula for a successful Archbishop of Canterbury, but the Buggin's Turn principle is designed for failure (and from a politician's point of view, for keeping the Church weak.) Rather than look for someone who would be a contrast to the present archbishop and dismantle what he has achieved, therefore, Downing Street and the Crown Appointments Commission next time should look for someone who will build on it. That has to mean another Evangelical.

In any event, of the three traditional schools of churchmanship in the Church of England, Broad, High and Low (now known as Liberal, Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical), only the last does not have the look about it of a busted flush. Judging both from the output of the theological colleges and the energy in the parishes, it seems to be the destiny of the Church of England to take on an increasingly Evangelical slant, though perhaps incorporating Liberals and Anglo-Catholics as sub-sets within that. (Dr Carey himself is a good example of an Evangelical with Catholic leanings.)

As for comprehensiveness, it is no longer necessary to look for it entirely within the Church of England. As Cardinal Hume showed, the Roman Catholic Church can nowadays do a better job at upholding the Catholic ethos in national life than any Anglo-Catholic churchman such as the Archbishop of York (Dr David Hope) or the Bishop of London. The necessary balance, therefore, can now be achieved differently and the frustrating and inefficient zigzag at Lambeth Palace can stop. Robert Runcie, who sadly died on Tuesday, may be the last of his kind.

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DEATH OF ROBERT RUNCIE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph JULY 8 2000

The best and the worst

ROBERT ALEXANDER KENNEDY RUNCIE MC was typical of the best of Anglicanism and the worst of Anglicanism. Once described by a critic as a man who nailed his colours to the fence - a joke against himself he loved - he was the nicest but most indecisive human being to lead the Church of England for a century.

Inside every Runcie sermon was an after-dinner speech trying to get out (and at that art-form, he was magnificent). Meeting him was like meeting a successful solicitor from an English county town, simultaneously shrewd and unworldly, amusing but naughtily indiscreet. He had little malice but was not a great saint. Religious enthusiasts did not attract him: he was the quintessential Cavalier rather than Roundhead.

In retirement Runcie said things to his biographer he should not have done, then excused himself by remarking to had "done his best to die" before the book appeared. His pianist wife, Lindy, once told a Sunday newspaper that "too much religion makes me go off pop" and he didn't disagree with that either. He held the international Anglican Communion together not by the force of his doctrine or the depth of his spirituality, but by his cheerful self-deprecating amiability. He was really quite humble. Not surprisingly, Margaret Thatcher thought he was wet.

Yet she appointed him - her first tangle with matters ecclesiastical. Though his nomination to Canterbury from the see of St Albans in 1980 was no great surprise - none of the other runners outshone him - it may not have been unconnected with his lifelong friendship with William Whitelaw, then deputy Prime Minister. They invaded Normandy together in 1944, in tanks. So the Archbishop of Canterbury was able to go into the pulpit in St Paul's in the summer 1982 for the controversial Falklands memorial service wearing the discreet ribbon of the Military Cross, won on the battlefield. It was as if he wanted Mrs Thatcher to know: "Wet, maybe - but not that wet." The sermon did not please the militarists, but according to the feedback received by the Dean of St Paul's, Alan Webster, its decency and honesty charmed the military.

Runcie lived through far darker moments in his decade at Lambeth Palace, none more so than the bitter anonymous attack on his leadership by his old friend Canon Gary Bennett of Oxford in late 1987, in that year's Crockford's Preface. In the midst of the furore that followed - some of it aided and abetted from Lambeth Palace - Bennett committed suicide.

When Bennett was alive, what hurt Runcie most - inside, but also within the church - was Bennett's accusation that he had promoted his cronies, men who had worked with him either at Cuddesdon Theological College where he had been principal (1960-70), or later at the BBC, where he had had an indistinct role in religious broadcasting.

What grieved him most after his death, however, was the fact that Bennett died unreconciled, the old friendship not repaired. The truth was that Runcie was a warm and affectionate man, some say even a little camp, who really did enjoy the company of likeminded friends and thought nothing odd in surrounding himself with them. The real essence of Bennett's accusation, which history has not yet disproved, was that Runcie was good at leading the Church of England from nowhere to nowhere. I think maybe he did not think it was his job to take it somewhere. He was never quite sure he was the right man to be Archbishop of Canterbury.

Having annoyed Margaret Thatcher and the dryer Tories in 1982 over the Falklands, he was wetter still over the miners' strike in 1984. When the incoming Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, launched an attack on Ian MacGregor, chairman of the National Coal Board, as an "elderly incoming American", Runcie sent a reassuring handwritten note to MacGregor - which of course immediately leaked. He had wrongly assumed the Establishment still played by the rules of a gentleman's club, a mistake he was to make many times again.

Then in a sensational interview at the height of the coal strike he went to the opposite pole and spoke out against "treating people as scum", meaning but not quite saying that the Government had demonised its trade union opponents and was showing them no quarter. Two days later the IRA's Brighton bomb went off, bringing to a sudden end what was beginning to look like the mother of all church-state battles.

It was Runcie who commissioned the report which became Faith in the City in 1985, denounced even before publication by unnamed Government sources as "watered-down Marxism." Runcie had sent confidential copies to ministers in advance, once more not realising how ruthless the political world had become. In so far as the Church of England became the "real opposition" to Thatcherism in the 1980s, a boast one still hears today, it was because the Church stayed still when the Tories went to the right and Labour to the left. It was just a kind of middle-class English sense of fair play: there was no theological backbone to it. Until someone reminded him, Runcie had forgotten to include any theologians at all in the team which was to write Faith in the City.

He was much spun against - or "briefed against" as the saying went - by Westminster sources then and since. He refused to admit that it mattered to him, preferring to recall that "last time I met Margaret Thatcher she was perfectly fine to me." Perhaps such niceness was too naïve for this cynical world. But he earned the Church of England great credit by having so much of it. His strategy will not be long remembered, for there wasn't one. But he will be, most fondly.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph JULY 7 2000

Politics and virtue after Aristotle

NON-PROMISCUOUS READERS of this newspaper might not know that the Catholic theologian Hans Küng, host to Tony Blair for his "cashpoint" speech in Tubingen, Germany, last week, wrote to The Times, The Guardian and The Independent afterwards to complain about their trivialised coverage. Not to the Daily Telegraph, with whom Father Küng had no quarrel.

It was sad but not surprising that the media concentrated on the 250 words in a 5,300-word speech dealing with the nuisance of late-night hooliganism. Journalists are currently in the mood to report Mr Blair only as an object of ridicule. Speaking for myself but for once as a magistrate rather than a journalist, I thought his only mistake was to confuse spot fines with fixed penalties.

Had he proposed that the police should be able to issue a fixed penalty ticket of £100 (preserving the principle that fines are payable to the local magistrates' court) there would have been nothing wrong with his remarks. Maybe the police station could even accept payment of fines - on behalf of the court - by credit card, and the young men in question really would go home £100 lighter. If they thought it unfair they could ask to be prosecuted, just as motorists can.

As Professor Küng pointed out in his letter to Other Newspapers, the context of Mr Blair's remarks was a thoughtful lecture about "community". The relationship between the individual and the community, the issue he was trying to illustrate, lies behind a great deal of day-to-day politics. Most politicians are pragmatic in their responses, in effect doing what Mr Blair is often accused of doing: making up the answers as he goes along. What he was actually doing in his Tubingen speech was the opposite. He was laying out his first principles.

Let us take Mr Blair seriously, therefore. The relationship between a person and society is one of the recurrent themes of moral philosophy. The definitive treatise was written by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, definitive for European culture because it was adopted by Thomas Aquinas and hence became the "official" philosophy of medieval Europe. Some see it as still the implicit philosophy behind English common law.

Aristotelianism remains semi-official in the Catholic Church, where it is known as Thomism (after Aquinas). The rejection of Aristotle still throws a long shadow across Protestantism - Luther called Aristotle "that buffoon who has misled the church". When Anglicans talk about Reason alongside Scripture and Tradition as the foundation of their beliefs, they probably mean Aristotle.

Mr Blair's Tubingen speech made a lot of sense. One could only have wished for some recognition of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, (University of Notre Dame Press 1984), which was hailed as one of the most important works of moral philosophy since the war. It is not just a vindication of Aristotle after all. It is a powerful demolition of all philosophical systems that have been created in opposition to Aristotle.

MacIntyre argues that the failure of modern philosophers to provide a coherent theory of ethics has left Western post-Enlightenment culture with the stark alternatives of Nietzsche, the worship of the will that was ultimately manifested in Fascism, or what he calls emotivism (whose currently fashionable form is post-Modern relativism) - the worship of feelings.

It is not a word we are familiar with, but the concept is all around us. It says, in effect, that what is right for me is simply what feels right. There are no objective criteria "out there" we can appeal to: henceforth ethics is subjective and personal. Politics becomes personal too, as Mr Blair will have noticed - it is no longer about principles but about likes and dislikes.

MacIntyre summarises Aristotle as saying that the purpose of the moral life is to turn "who we are" into "who we ought to be", which provides an objective standard of progress if not of perfection. The method of progress is by the practice of virtue. But the "who we ought to be" is not a self in isolation. It is a participant in community. This is Mr Blair's territory again, except he uses the term "individual" apparently unaware of the extent to which it implies, as MacIntyre demonstrates, a modern emotivist or relativistic outlook.

The tension between the individual and the community may indeed be one of the major themes of modern politics, but an Aristotelian would not see it that way. This is why the doctrine of the common good is so powerful. It dissolves the individual into the community, and avoids us having to sermonise about bottomless individual "rights and responsibilities." By his virtuous actions each person adds to the common good, thus benefiting and bettering the community he lives in and benefiting and bettering himself. Drunken louts do the opposite, and the rest of us are entitled to our revenge.

Note also Aristotle's "virtues" rather than Mr Blair's "values". One is action, the other is thought verging on feeling. At the risk of being one more person offering simplistic advice to the Prime Minister, I recommend he reads After Virtue. More valuable than reading The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, perhaps...

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LAYLINES
by Clifford Longley

The Tablet JULY 1 2000

Ashamed of my Church

IN THE AUTUMN of 1968 a small delegation of lay Catholics met Cardinal Heenan at Archbishop's House, Westminster, to discuss the issue of birth control. Various priests in England and Wales had been publicly suspended from their posts or otherwise disciplined by their bishops for speaking out against Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae. There had to be a better way.

The cardinal said he had been reluctant to agree to the meeting. But having heard what the delegation had to say, he admitted he had begun to see things in a different light. Far from being disloyal "bad" Catholics, the delegation seemed to him to be speaking out of a love of the Catholic Church and sincere distress at the turmoil, and hence the appalling publicity, that had overtaken it.

To use a modern expression, the Church had "shot itself in the foot" over this issue. The bishops were trying to cope with a rebellion for which nothing in the past had prepared them, made all the more difficult by the fact the rebels were committed, educated, faithful, practising Catholics, not those who usually made trouble.

The same applies today, when once again, on a related issue, the Church appears to be unreasonable and oppressive. Many times since the first appearance of Aids, spokesmen for the Church in various parts of the world have closed the door on one obvious remedy for the Aids/HIV epidemic, the ready availability of condoms. They have done so because the Church's teaching, elaborated in the encyclical Humanae Vitae, insisted that "each and every marriage act" should remain "open to the transmission of life". (This is not a perfect translation of the papal Latin, but it is the most familiar one.)

As has happened repeatedly in Aids-ravaged Africa and not so long ago in France, attempts to get round the hardline Catholic position against condoms have been thwarted by the heavy hand of church authority. This has now become a cause celebre in Brazil, where Aids is rampant. As The Tablet reported last week, a Catholic Church committee has recommended making condoms available as the lesser of two evils, and senior members of the hierarchy have condemned it for doing so.

There is no issue under heaven that causes more distress to practising Catholics than repeated church opposition to the most effective, and therefore necessary, remedy for preventing the spread of Aids. It is certainly not life that is being transmitted when someone with Aids has unprotected sexual intercourse. "Each and every marriage act should remain open to the transmission of death" is a hellish doctrine that cannot possibly have been what Pope Paul VI intended. Yet the strict interpreters of the Church's teaching have impaled themselves on that interpretation because of the principle that it is wrong to do evil that good may come out of it: that the end can never justify the means.

What poignancy that phrase takes on when one considers the hundreds of thousands of children orphaned by Aids in central Africa. Has their desperate plight become the "means" to the "end" of upholding the authority of Paul VI? Does he really merit such a terrible monument? Or does some point arrive at which the disproportion between means and end overrides the principle? Newman famously thought not, and boasted that the smallest lie was to be avoided even at the cost of unimaginable suffering. But he was not infallible; and in that instance, furthermore, he was engaging in gross hyperbole simply in order to win an argument.

Only someone consumed with hatred of the Church could enjoy the spectacle of what is, in the quite literal sense, a scandal. What makes it all the more painful is that it is not necessary. There is a better way. Assuming that Humanae Vitae was correct on the use of sexuality within marriage - and we are not going to persuade conservative churchmen to lift their objection to condoms on any other basis - and assuming that the principle that the end never justifies the means is nonnegotiable, there is nevertheless a valid theological rationale for the use of condoms to prevent the spread of Aids. It is by applying the principle of double effect.

If a husband infected with Aids through a blood transfusion, say, has intercourse with his wife, he is threatening her life if he does not use a condom. In using a condom his intent is to perform the subjectively and objectively good act of making love to her while not threatening her life, It is not, per se, to prevent conception; he may even regret that the condom also has that effect.

But his semen contains an inextricable mixture of spermatozoa, whose journey to the Fallopian tube it is wrong (according to Humanae Vitae) deliberately to interrupt, and particles of HIV virus, the agent of an incurable and deadly disease which must be interrupted at all cost. In order to interrupt the latter it is inevitable, as a foreseeable but unintended consequence, that you also interrupt the former. This, under the principle of double effect, is allowable.

I would say that in all honesty and humanity, it is not only allowable but obligatory. And there are few things I could wish for more fervently than that the Church should say so too. I am not generally ashamed to be a Catholic, but in this one respect, I am afraid I have to admit, I really am.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph JUNE 30 2000

How hard cases made bad law

WERE ANY HOMOSEXUAL JUDGES ever really blackmailed? How many people trapped in loveless marriages were really rescued by divorce law reform in 1969? And do the Government's reasons for coupling "other stable relationships" with "marriage" in proposed new statutory guidelines on sex education really stand up?

These are not random questions. The first two are linked, and help answer the third. Campaigns for sexual and family law reform, whether 40 years ago or current, run according to a similar pattern.

Aware that homosexuals were viewed unsympathetically by the public, campaigners in the early 1960s invented a target group whose treatment under the law was a recognisable public mischief. Homosexuals holding important public offices, such as senior politicians and judges, were said to be exposed to blackmail and hence liable to corruption. Earnest advocates of change went forth to plead, on radio, television, Parliament and elsewhere, that this danger alone was enough to justify decriminalising homosexuality among adults. And asked for evidence, they knew someone who knew someone who new someone...

They added, of course, that the reform they proposed would have little effect other than putting blackmailers out of business. These campaigners weren't lying: they really had persuaded themselves that the blackmailing of homosexual judges was a major social problem.

Next came abortion. Aware that it was viewed with horror by the public, campaigners focused on one target group - in this case desperate women who had had "botched backstreet abortions" - whose plight cried out for remedy. The Abortion Law Reform Act was advanced as a measure to put backstreet abortionists out of business: beyond that, it would have little effect. In fact most illegal abortions at the time were done by doctors.

Divorce law reform followed much the same course. Indeed, its chief campaigner, Alastair Service, had been chief campaigner over abortion and moved smoothly across from one to the other. He had no ideological motive: he just enjoyed lobbying. This time the target disadvantaged group became "people trapped in loveless marriages". Earnest supporters of the measure went forth again to tell of people they knew, or people known to people they knew, whose lives (and worse, whose children's lives) were being ruined by their inability to divorce. The undesirables to be put out of business were women who provided evidence of "hotel" adultery for a fee.

The fact that the abortion and divorce rates shot up out of sight once the law was changed genuinely took the campaigners aback. They even talked reassuringly about "clearing the backlog" - until it was clear the figures were not coming down again. And those "people trapped in loveless marriages"? Like the blackmailed judges, they were never heard of again.

The same pattern fits other liberal reform campaigns, such as over obscene publications and illegitimacy. No way did campaigners anticipate the flood of pornography with zero literary merit that the change unleashed. No way did campaigners envisage the day when 40 per cent of children would be born out of wedlock. They were trying to relieve an existing problem, marginal to most people's experience, where the law did not seem fair. There was no conspiracy: they were not anti-Christian; some were churchmen. They were just trying to do good.

But like all single-issue campaigners everywhere, they had no truck with the principle "hard cases make bad law." In every case, success depended on putting forward a sympathetic target group - said to be particularly disadvantaged by existing law - which was hard for fair-minded people to attack. Even better if there were identifiable villains preying on that target group who could be put out of business.

In two contemporary cases, exactly the same mechanisms for changing public opinion can be seen at work. Concerning reform of Section 28, the supposed evil is playground bullying of vulnerable homosexual pupils. Who can side with a bully? No way are campaigners trying to clear the way for sixth form gay and lesbian societies to hold regular discos in the gym, which is what will eventually happen.

But what is unthinkable this side of a particular law reform becomes easy enough to live with afterwards. Each change softens up public opinion for the next. What politician would seriously campaign to bring abortions or divorce down by two-thirds, or to recriminalise homosexual acts?

The argument for including "other stable relationships" in the forms of family life alongside marriage to be recommended during sex education lessons is that many parents cohabit without marrying. Otherwise their children will feel "stigmatised", we are confidently told - and invited to think of little Suzie weeping in the playground, having just learnt that her parent's domestic arrangements are not sanctioned by the National Curriculum.

Despite the sincere conviction of the campaigners, Suzie does not exist, any more than blackmailed judges existed. They are hypothetical, designed to help us change our minds. The unforeseen consequences are almost always far more sweeping than we ever expected, and we would never have supported the reform if we had known about them at the time. Nor - and this is the greatest irony - would most of the campaigners.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph JUNE 23 2000

When labels don't travel well

AN AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE is typically someone who is against abortion, against gay rights, against gun control, against state medicine, and for the death penalty. It is perfectly possible to be a British Conservative and to hold none of those opinions - indeed, to find oneself classified as a Lefty Liberal in American terms. Political labels do not travel well.

Hence reports that William Hague wants to take the Conservative party in the direction of the "compassionate conservatism" of George Bush Jnr are not as straightforward as they look. The package associated with the work of Professor Marvin Olasky, Mr Bush's social policy guru, implies a particular relationship with religion. But religious labels do not travel well either.

There is no equivalent in Britain of "the Religious Right" in American politics, nor even the barest foundations for building a "Christian Coalition" of the sort that has campaigned in America for more than a decade. It has been estimated that more than a third of Americans would describe themselves as "born-again Christians". In England it is doubtful whether they amount to half of one percent.

The greatest difference, however, relates to attitudes to the role of the State. The mainstream churches were constantly critical of Thatcherism - hence all those "Runcie versus Thatcher" headlines of the 1980s. They were loath to let go of the social and political consensus called "Butskellism" (a combination of "Butler" and "Gaitskell") that Margaret Thatcher made it her mission to destroy. Her much misunderstood remark "there is no such thing as society" resonated precisely because of her radical demythologising attitude to the State. It rubbed against 40 years of established social policy.

This issue even touches on English national identity. In the postwar period when the Welfare State and the National Health Service were created, it would have seemed quite natural to regard the State not purely as a secular entity but also as a religious and moral one. English patriotism had an almost mystical element to it. The national Church, it was commonly said, represented the nation in its spiritual aspect. That was why it was logical, even necessary, to have the Head of State as Head of the Church (or Supreme Governor, to make a distinction without a difference). England did not have a Constitution, it had a Coronation.

If the nation was a moral and religious entity, a sort of church in itself, then it was necessary for it to have a charitable aspect too. For that was what Christ commanded. The Welfare State and the National Health Service became Britain's answer to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and "charity was nationalised" (as Cardinal Griffin complained.) The Church of England, seeing itself as "the English nation in its spiritual aspect", felt it no longer needed to make its own separate investment in health, education, child welfare and so on. Its duty was to support the State - of which it was itself a part - in tackling those things. Even the schools which though publicly funded continued to bear its name were regarded as a contribution to the general good rather than as places where Anglican Christianity could be handed on to the next generation.

Thus the ideology of the welfare state constituted part of the complex network of Church-State relations, emotional as well as constitutional, that went under the heading of Establishment. In return for not having Anglican hospitals and Anglican prisons, for example, every State-run hospital and prison had Anglican chaplains on the payroll. The National Health Service and the Welfare State were not so much Socialist projects, therefore, as embodiments of the idea of the Christian nation-state just as Britain emerged from its purifying, unifying and spiritually uplifting victory in the Second World War.

This is the fading inheritance that many influential people in the Church of England have become not only tired of but even alarmed by. Far from guaranteeing the continued presence of the Church of England at the centre of national life, it has tended to have the opposite effect. The English have become the most secularised people in Europe, and almost nobody now thinks the tide is about to turn. Inside the Church (though perhaps not yet at the top) one can sense a sea-change, a feeling that it needs to reposition itself vis a vis the rest of society, in the light of this changed social reality.

There is increasing support for the view that the Church now needs to establish a "critical distance" between itself and a society that is no longer recognisably Christian. And Anglicans are starting to let go of one of the central ideas not only of English identity in the past, but also of Anglican identity - that the Church of England is the English nation in its spiritual aspect.

If Mr Hague is subtle enough, therefore, he may find that his policy of inviting greater participation of distinctively religious groups in social welfare arrangements in Britain is pushing at an open door. If he thinks America and England are sufficiently similar to argue from one to the other, however, he will be wasting his breath.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph JUNE 16 2000

Moral maze of the PC world

SOME YEARS AGO I hung out a sign, as it were, asking if anyone would care to come forward with a Judaeo-Christian critique of political correctness. PC is a creed with a lot hidden beneath the surface, I suspected, and it needed someone to take it apart.

The consensus seemed to be that PC was really just another name for good manners. It taught us to treat with respect people who were different from ourselves, and so on. Not only is this a fundamental mistake. The purest form of PC - as taught, say, in social work courses ten years ago - is actually very intolerant and ill-mannered. But I also got the feeling that PC had entered the church's soul. Churchmen of all types were afraid of it and felt they must not offend it.

One man famous for not being afraid of this particular Big Bad Wolf is Cardinal Winning, Archbishop of Glasgow. He has just published in The Spectator an outspoken attack on the fruits of Scottish devolution, a cause he previously upheld. In it he declares: "People did not elect a Scottish Parliament to push through an agenda of political correctness which runs counter to the innate values and traditions of our people."

His primary concern is the campaign to repeal Section 28. The dispute has become a very polarised and unpleasant one in Scotland, far from the good manners of my optimistic correspondents. Words like "pervert" on the one hand and "bigot" on the other have been regularly hurled about.

On the face of it, Section 28 prohibits the promotion of homosexuality in schools (which it does not quite do, but let us not split hairs.) Those who want to repeal it may logically be presumed to want to do the thing the law now prevents them doing, otherwise why demand its repeal? They may logically be presumed to want to promote homosexuality in schools, and Cardinal Winning has every right to say he thinks that is an appalling idea.

Those who claim that they do not want to promote homosexuality in schools although they do still want Section 28 repealed, have an uphill task. Their message runs counter to simple logic. In fact their position only makes sense in PC theory. The problem is that PC theory also says those who do not grasp its fundamental moral truth at once are themselves morally disordered - bigoted, if you will - and you can't argue with them, only fight them. That does make dialogue and mutual understanding a little difficult.

The primary analogy here is the PC theory of racism, which is because PC originates in the Black civil rights struggle in the United States. (I should add, lest I too be dismissed as a bigot, that American society does indeed seem to me to be institutionally racist). PC builds outwards from there to identify various groups, mostly minorities but also including woman, who are the target of continuous, systematic quasi-racist oppression.

PC is about class-conflict, therefore, between various oppressed groups and the dominant power in society, vaguely identifiable as White, male, married, heterosexual, and able-bodied. The oppressed groups include non-whites, women, single parents, homosexuals and the disabled, including the curiously named "people with a learning disability". The theory of class-conflict reveals PC's origins in West European Marxism, and later Marxists talked about "forging alliances of oppressed peoples." Unfortunately for them, the organised working class has in practice emerged as one of the least PC sections of society.

PC theory says that in whatever respect each group's lot falls short of what is desired, this is the fault of the society. The remedy therefore lies in changing the attitudes and behaviour of the majority. Nothing is required of the victim, except that he (or she, to be PC about it) be empowered to demand his (or her, ditto) rights. In the case of disabled people, even research into cures is deemed politically incorrect: parents of deaf children, for instance, are urged to refuse cochlea implants.

The PC name for the fundamental sin is discrimination. Section 28 is "discriminatory", and therefore must go. The desire to discriminate is a thought-crime, a politically incorrect attitude. It is called racism, sexism, homophobia, according to context. In the PC code all these are species of bigotry. But one of the cleverest things about PC is that there is no actual code book, with an author and a publisher, which we can all look at. It is, as it were, blowing in the wind.

There is much in PC that can be admired from a Christian standpoint, not least its identification with the least powerful and most vulnerable in society. There is also much which is quite contrary to it, above all its Manichaean division of society into warring sections, good and bad, and its cultivation of class conflict, even hatred, as an agent for social change. But its real problem is that it does not deliver the goods: there is no PC heaven remotely in sight. It does not make homosexuals, say, feel good about themselves. It makes them feel victimised - by perfectly humane people like Tom Winning.

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LAYLINES
by Clifford Longley

The Tablet JUNE 17 2000

Why Tony is a disappointment

IN A RECENT TELEGRAPH column Bill Deedes praised the restraint of the Nigerian student who, demonstrating against President Olusegun Obasanjo, held up a placard saying "Obasanjo is a disappointment." One might liken this to the slow hand-clap Tony Blair received at a rally of Women's Institute members last week.

We don't assassinate our leaders in Britain when we get tired of them, we fidget with our knitting at them. I was trying to explain the incident to someone in America, and no way could I convince her that the Prime Minister's minor public embarrassment had since become a defining moment in British politics. Nobody had pulled out a gun; there was no impeachment process, no Watergate burglary, no oral sex in the Cabinet Room, just a boring speech mildly heckled.

If the incident mattered at all, that can only be because it caught the public mood. At its simplest, people are tired of promises and want results (while simultaneously the media is tired of government popularity and wants failure). The Government was elected to rescue key public services from the mess the Tories had let them get into, and this hasn't happened. So we didn't want a preacher at 10, Downing Street, we wanted a doer. Yet Mr Blair seems fascinated by political and moral generalities, devotes most of his public speeches to them, and can't quite understand why this makes him unpopular.

Partly it is style. He sounds sanctimonious and moralistic. This is because his key idea is the pre-eminence of what he calls "values". It is by this device that he tries to show not only that his New Labour project is a natural extension of the old Socialist Labour party - same values, different economics - but also that New Labour's values are the same as those of the vast majority of the population, so-called Middle Britain: tolerance, fairness, opportunity, sunshine, what have you. His remedy for those parts of the social system which frustrate the realisation of those values is, to use another of his words, modernisation. And those who resist this modernisation are "the forces of conservatism." This, in a nutshell, is Blairism. And the WI event was widely spun in advance as the relaunch of Blairism, now that the Blairs had finished doing that characteristically Blairish thing of having a baby.

Blairism is full of decent and humane sentiments. But as a political philosophy it lacks depth and coherence - falling short both horizontally and vertically, so to speak. Thus one might ask by what means are values transmitted through society from one generation to the next, and the answer is through the culture of institutions - the family, the WI, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Transport and General Workers Union, Oxford University, the Methodist Church, the BBC, and so on. Britain has a rich plurality of intermediate institutions, but politicians don't like them because they are hard to control.

Margaret Thatcher was an institution wrecker; Tony Blair, more an institution mocker. For it is within such institutions that lurk not just the "values" he admires but also the "forces of conservatism" he wishes to sweep away. Indeed, they are often the same thing looked at from a different angle. Thus Oxbridge admissions policies may be "forces of conservatism" in the Blairite book but they exist to protect and preserve the values those universities hold dear, such as the pursuit of excellence and the importance of civilised intellectual discourse.

Social institutions are necessary to a healthy society because they stand between the naked power of the state (or in the economic aspect, the global free market) and the solitary powerlessness of the individual. They are fundamental to the defence of family, therefore. This is one of the most useful insights of Catholic social teaching, and it would be a great help to Mr Blair, with respect, if he took a massive dose of it on board just now.

Maybe it is giving Blairism too much credit to analyse it at this level. But it is at this level that the real contradictions emerge, and I suspect many people get a sense of that without being able to say exactly why. They want clean hospitals readily accessible, now, and they do not see what airy platitudes have to do with it (truisms though they may be). Never mind the dirt and the waiting lists, says Mr Blair, admire my pious intentions. And so we start to clap, very slowly. To make its point a little clearer, the WI should have burst into a chorus of "Why Are We Waiting?"

This is a fairly competent and honest government all the same. Current policies and expenditure levels (now liberated from a foolish commitment to match Tory proposed spending levels for two years) may well start to deliver exactly what was promised for the nation's schools and hospitals in 1997. That is why Tony Blair is likely to be re-elected with a good majority in a year or so. It is at the level of rhetoric that he falls down.

There is a possible explanation for that. As every teacher or sub-editor knows, the person who has least difficulty expressing his ideas is the one who understands them best. Muddle in language, or even just muddiness, is a sign of intellectual half-digestion.

Political philosophy is something Mr Blair is not good at - the editor of the New Statesman said the text of the WI lecture would have been rejected as unpublishable had it come in as an article from a backbencher. But it is what he thinks he is good at. That is a case of cognitive dissonance. And it is fundamentally why we are disappointed.

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LAYLINES
by Clifford Longley

The Tablet JUNE 3 2000

Open to all classes

ONE OF THE QUESTIONS I was repeatedly asked in the sixth form of my minor (ie non-boarding) public school was "Which college are you applying to?" - not "Which university?" or even the more general "What do you want to do when you leave school?" It was taken for granted that an Oxford or Cambridge college was the thing to aim for. My reply "Southampton University, to do civil engineering" produced a condescending "How unusual!" from one master, and "What's that?" from another. Whether his query referred to the subject or the institution, I do not know.

Such memories were brought back by the row over Laura Spence, the comprehensive schoolgirl from the North East of England who was rejected by Magdalen College, Oxford, but then won a scholarship to Harvard. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, called Oxford's treatment of her an absolute scandal, but began to lose the argument when it emerged that other candidates of similar qualification and background had succeeded where Laura had failed.

When a leaked college memorandum said Laura's lack of self-confidence in her interview was typical of a comprehensive school pupil, this was claimed as evidence by both sides. The college said it showed they were making allowances for her; the college's critics that it showed there was prejudice against her. It seems Mr Brown had landed a glancing blow on the right target, but was still a long way from the bull's-eye.

His general point, that the road to Britain's best universities is a lot easier for those from independent (public) schools than those from state schools, even for applicants of similar ability and achievement, seems to be confirmed by the statistics. With less then ten per cent of the total school population, the independent sector supplies about half the intake of Britain's best universities. But it is also true that Oxford and Cambridge are well aware of this, and for some years have been trying to counteract it.

A clue to why independent schools traditionally perform so well in this area may lie in my own teenage reminiscence. Such schools take certain things for granted, one of which is that they are educating the elite of the next generation. Needless to say, this is not part of the ethos of the average comprehensive: no wonder poor Laura felt a little intimidated. Among the best pupils from the best public schools, Oxbridge is automatically what they aim for and the question "Which college?" is asked almost as routinely today as it was 40 years ago. They approach what they see as their birthright with all due confidence.

The proportion of Oxbridge graduates among today's top lawyers, doctors, civil servants and Fleet Street leader writers is not much different now from what it was then. The real question Mr Brown has put his finger on, which really does need a deeper level of public debate than his outburst has provoked so far, is whether this will still be true 40 years from now. And if that is the way we are heading, is it good enough; and if not, what do we have to do to change it?

As the former Tory Education Minister George Walden never tires of reiterating, the English habit of separating children into two educational systems is a uniquely perverse way of enshrining the division of society along class lines. It destroys social cohesion as well as being immensely wasteful. It is one of the main reasons foreigners still perceive the English as class-ridden, despite our oft-repeated but self-deluding mantra that we have put all that behind us.

But it is a complex phenomenon, rooted as much in working class anti-intellectualism and inverted snobbery as it is in real snobbery among the upper-middle classes. Try a "cultivated" accent in a council estate school anywhere in Britain, and feel the derision. Behind their backs, squaddies in the army scornfully dismiss ex-public school junior officers as "Ruperts". Accent, school, family, job, cultural taste, even religion, all contribute to this, and it may well have something to do with the fact that we live under a monarchy based on aristocracy, which stands at the top of a hierarchy of social caste and defines its structure in terms of upper, middle and lower (and within them, middle-upper, lower-middle, and so on.)

It is absurd to blame all this on Oxbridge admissions tutors, but just as absurd to pretend they are not part of the problem at all. Just as the police have eschewed direct racism but may still be guilty of institutionalised racism, so Oxbridge colleges have turned their back on direct class discrimination but may still be guilty of what may be called institutionalised classism. Like institutionalised racism it is unwitting, harder to spot, harder to eradicate, and those accused of it invariably react, at first, with indignation. Handled with tact, however, this reaction can lead to deeper insight, and eventually to a correction.

Class touches the whole of English society more deeply even than race, and raises similar issues of national identity. It would be nice to think the Government was half way to understanding this, but passing shots such as the Chancellor's over Laura Spence may make things worse not better. All he has managed so far is to confirm a few prejudices and stir up resentment on both sides. We can't begin to discuss the issue constructively until we can do so in a way that blames or threatens no-one. But discuss it we surely must.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph JUNE 2 2000

Spirituality versus religion

LET US SUPPOSE for a moment that the Church of England was a commercial organisation - CofE PLC, say. Let us suppose, furthermore, that the recent poll of moral and religious opinion conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) for the BBC was a market survey, testing the product against public demand. The board of directors would quickly conclude that something had gone badly wrong and the company was not producing what the public wanted. Advertising and promotion, to persuade potential customers to want what was on offer, was not working. They would have to change the product or go under. They can hardly cut the price, as their product is free at the point of use.

That sums up the dilemma facing the Church of England in particular. It has always claimed a special mission to the whole of English society. It was not so much into niche marketing as other churches. The fact that the majority of the English seem to have given up on organised religion, but still see themselves as vaguely "spiritual", is of less pressing concern to Roman Catholics and Methodists. They have a more specific religious message to sell, targeted more to their own members.

ORB's head, Gordon Heald, concluded an article in The Tablet about his survey by saying: "These findings underline the need for vision and leadership to help people rediscover their true spiritual roots." The survey fully confirmed an earlier one by ORB (Sacred and Profane December 17 1999) that people made a distinction between "the religious" and "the spiritual" in their lives, seeing them almost as opposites.

By religion they meant the Established Church, Sunday worship, the Christian idea of God, the Bible, bishops and vicars, the whole thing. By the spiritual they meant praying in private their own way, belief in a soul, survival after death, the existence of a transcendental "life force", and refusing to accept that science and materialism was "all there is". Significantly, for the good of society they wished "religion" would be more successful, presumably meaning they wanted other people - but not themselves - to take it more seriously. Thus religion (in the public's view) seems to be about social control, which is indeed a traditional view of it, and spirituality seems to be about spontaneity. So "other people" need the framework of religion's moral teaching, while "we" need the freedom to follow our intuition.

There are many other such contradictions - for instance large numbers of people like to pray but do not believe in God as a person, so whom do they pray to? But nobody said people have to be logical in their beliefs. The very distinction between religion and spirituality is not logical. But what our board of directors cannot do is to sack its customers and get a new lot. They are stuck with these ones, though they might ask to what extent they have contributed to the picture the ORB survey reveals.

So it is plain the Church of England should start to sell "spirituality", as that is clearly what the punters want. There are in fact many products in the warehouse which fit this market. Some are out there already, though not necessarily branded by the church. The recent National Gallery exhibition Seeing Salvation was not a church initiative, but the most successful of its kind ever. Commercial CDs of the best religious music in the classical music canon - Bach and Mozart in particular - are good sellers, as are Gregorian chant and such medieval treasures as Hildegard of Bingen. The contemporary British composers Tavener and MacMillan have opened up new business in this sphere.

Giving the people what they want would suggests that parish churches should make a regular musical festival - advertised as "spiritual' rather than "religious" - a key part of their schedule, both for participation and for listening to. And why is there no Church House CD label (preferably called something else)?

Similarly, people associate spirituality with nature, and the English especially with gardens. Flower festivals are becoming increasingly popular. Why not start a parish spiritual garden, therefore, especially where there is an under-used churchyard? Sponsorship from local garden centres would be welcome, and Japanese inspiration would be helpful. But not essential: the garden maze, for instance, was regarded in the Middle Ages as a spiritual aid in itself (because those at the entrance may actually get to the centre sooner than those who have already started in but take a wrong turning.)

Music and gardens are by no means the only routes to go down. But spirituality has to be marketed sincerely, not with a view to a switch-sale back to dry old "religion" once the customer has been softened up. The public would soon spot that. It would also require a certain broad-mindedness among Church of England congregations and their leaders, such as a willingness to invite a Catholic monk to lecture on monastic prayer or a Buddhist on how to meditate.

But the division between the "religious" and the "spiritual" is in fact an imaginary one, and whatever meets people's spiritual needs would, so to speak, move them nearer to God. The rest can safely be left to Him.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph MAY 26 2000

Wave-particle duality at Canterbury

THE CAPACITY TO HOLD several contradictory ideas in his head at once is a talent shortly to be needed by Lord Hurd of Westwell (formerly Douglas Hurd, Foreign Secretary). As he stated in his letter to the Daily Telegraph on Thursday, he has been asked to conduct a review of the office of Archbishop of Canterbury. He will quickly discover that the Primate of All England is both a wave and a particle.

As a localised particle, he heads the senior diocese in the Church of England - senior, as it happens, because a medieval Pope said so, striking down the claim of an Archbishop of York to equal status. (York was given the lesser title "Primate of England" as a consolation prize.) But the See of Canterbury, one of the smaller Anglican dioceses, is the only thing he can actually run, hands on. In fact, such is the pressure from other aspects of his job, he largely leaves it to his suffragan bishops.

For it is as a wave of energy that he is kept really busy. The office of Archbishop of Canterbury does not define the Church of England, which could exist without him. But it does define the Anglican Communion, the grouping of 38 self-governing churches worldwide, most of whom were originally overseas missionary branches of the Church of England.

Lord Hurd will be told by all those 38 national churches that it is their link with Canterbury that makes them Anglican. That link is expressed through the summons all Anglican bishops receive to a Lambeth Conference every ten years, through the far more frequent meetings of the 38 primates, and through the Anglican Consultative Council and its permanent secretariat in London. None of these could function without Canterbury.

Lord Hurd will also note that the system of nominating Archbishops of Canterbury by the British Prime Minister is regarded by other Anglican provinces as an impediment to the development of the archbishop's international role. It is as if the Pope were to be appointed by the Italian Government. Were the Archbishop of Canterbury to be chosen exclusively by the Anglican Communion itself, or even exclusively by the Church of England, other provinces would be much more prepared to elevate him from an object of affection and respect to one of authority. This is a critical issue within the Anglican Communion.

If Lord Hurd visits the Vatican as part of his review, he may well come away thinking "This is not for us". Nevertheless it is in this area that the balance between contradictory demands has to be made. Freeing the Archbishop of Canterbury from any involvement with the British state may free him to develop a greater international status, but arguably it would weaken his national role. This is what Lord Hurd will be told, and no doubt what he is disposed to believe.

It is nevertheless fair to ask whether the influence of the late Cardinal O'Connor in the affairs of New York, say, was in any way lessened by the American separation of church and state. Maybe it was even enhanced. Lord Hurd could ask the same of church leaders in Spain, France, Italy or even Ireland, all of which have unravelled church from state. Sweden has just taken the same step.

Indeed, a greater international role for the Archbishop of Canterbury could more than compensate for any slight tendency of his national prestige to diminish as a result of his post being freed from its place in the English church-state nexus. The pluses would outweigh the minuses. He would give up some of his constitutional status in return for a gain in his moral authority.

These are bigger questions, probably, than Lord Hurd bargained for when he agreed to undertake his inquiry. But to confine himself to questions of efficiency would be to ignore the wider context. Constitutional questions are also involved, even questions of national identity. So are theological questions. The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission has examined the theory of church authority in great detail, and has had a profound influence on the way Anglicans see themselves. A summit of Anglican primates and top Roman Catholic church leaders has just taken place in Toronto - with the Archbishop of Canterbury in the chair, needless to say - where some of these issues were discussed.

If the Anglican Communion is to come of age as a world church, sooner or later it has to appoint its own leader. He could then spend more time on its internal affairs, not least as a mediator of differences and arbitrator of quarrels. But this would not be compatible with the present role of the Archbishop of Canterbury in England. That is the squaring of the circle that Lord Hurd has been asked to achieve.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph MAY 19 2000

An ecclesiastical "West Lothian Question'

STORM CLOUDS ARE SLOWLY ACCUMULATING over the issue of state control of the Church of England. The question among the Church's leaders seems to be not if a final conflict will ensue, but when. They want it to be over an issue serious enough to justify a fight to the death - the matter in dispute being the legal and constitutional link between Church and State known as the Establishment.

This is the most significant fall-out from the decision of the Legislative Committee of the General Synod to give way to the Parliamentary Ecclesiastical Committee over the Churchwardens Measure. The Ecclesiastical Committee scrutinises all draft Church of England legislation on behalf of both Houses of Parliament, and recommends it for passage or not. Unless both Houses give their consent, Church of England legislation cannot become law.

In this case the Ecclesiastical Committee objected to a provision in the Churchwardens Measure which would give the diocesan bishop the right to suspend any churchwarden "for any reason which seems to him to be good and reasonable." The Committee felt this degree of discretion was too wide, and wanted the clause withdrawn or amended. When an amendment was proposed but rejected, the General Synod was at first inclined to try to go over the heads of the Committee, but thought better of it. The consensus seemed to be that a conflict was inevitable sooner or later, but this was too trivial and domestic a matter.

Dr Christine Baxter, chairman of the synod's House of Laity, said "There are those who would think it very good to have a test case in Parliament over something that is a housekeeping matter, others who think that if we are going to have a test case, it would be better to have it over a big issue." There do not seem to be many church people thinking it would be a good idea not to have a test case at all. Battle lines are clearly being drawn for a showdown sooner or later. "Clash with state is put off" is how the Church Times headlined it.

The Ecclesiastical Committee largely consists of those MPs and Peers who put themselves forward for election, and one persistent criticism from the Church side is that it consists of politicians who may not be sympathetic to the Church of England, or at least not to its present direction. One member, for instance, is John Gummer, who has publicly repudiated the Church of England by becoming a Roman Catholic. The Ecclesiastical Committee views itself as neither pro or anti-establishment per se, but as having a job of work to do so long as the arrangement exists. If the Church of England opts not to be established, then its bishops would gain the freedom to treat churchwardens however they liked (within the ordinary constraints of law).

There was a time when the Ecclesiastical Committee was regarded as a pillar of the constitution, and many Anglicans actually welcomed the status it symbolised. It lubricated the relationship between the Synod and Parliament, spotting trouble before it got out of hand. But in the year 2000 it is a safe bet that a substantial majority of members of the General Synod now regard the Committee as merely an irritant. This is despite the fact that the Committee does not go fishing in deep doctrinal waters, but says the sort of thing about church legislation that other Parliamentary committees might just as well say about, for instance, a new university statute. Thus a Vice Chancellor would not be allowed to dismiss a car park attendant, say, "for any reason which seems to him to be good and reasonable."

But it is not just the patience of the General Synod that is being tried. The general public is entitled to ask whether the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, which represents citizens of all religious persuasions and none, should concern itself with the internal details of one religious institution, albeit one with a particular historical role in one part of the Kingdom. Parliament is not involved in vetting Church of Scotland legislation, though that too is established, nor in Church in Wales and Church of Ireland legislation, as those two Anglican Churches are already disestablished.

There is an ecclesiastical version of the West Lothian Question lurking just out of focus here: why should Jewish or Catholic MPs representing Muslims or atheists in Cardiff or Glasgow have any say in the affairs of a religious body in England, to which only two per cent of the English population subscribes? They can hardly claim to be representing the interests of their constituents. What then is the justification of their involvement?

There is more to this question than churchwardens. Behind it lies a sense of growing distance between the aims and objects of the nation at large, as represented through Parliament, and the aims and objects of the Church of England. In essence, establishment gives a non-Anglican body ultimate control over the affairs of the national (Anglican) church, even down to tiny details - which the treatment of churchwardens surely is. This is an anomaly that sooner or later has to be removed.

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LAYLINES
by Clifford Longley

The Tablet MAY 20 2000

Closing the laity gap

IN MARCH THE TABLET PUBLISHED AN EXTRACT from a lecture I had given at St Mary's College, Strawberry Hill, in which I had said there seemed to be a shortfall of lay participation in decision-making in the Catholic Church in this country. Not everybody agreed, but from the resulting correspondence and other sources I get the impression of a general feeling in favour of closing this gap but some uncertainty as to how.

I did not suggest a blueprint for new Catholic structures. But it has since dawned on me that I have been commenting on the internal decision-making processes of Britain's churches probably longer than anyone else alive, Catholic or other. This wearily earned distinction tempts me to climb out of the press box onto the playing field, so to speak, and take a kick at the ball myself.

The crucial gap is theological, as the deficiency in question relates to the sensus fidelium. The authorities I cited were both from reports of the two Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commissions. The first commission had said in its Final Report: "The perception of God's will for his church does not only belong to the ordained ministry but is shared by all its members." And in its recent document The Gift of Authority, the second commission had celebrated an Anglican-Catholic consensus that "because of their baptism and their participation in the sensus fidelium the laity play an integral part in decision-making in the Church". Meaning they should do, presumably.

The phrases that strike me most in the two passages quoted above are, in the first, "shared by" and in the second "play an integral part in." Neither suggests an open season for bishop-bashing, like old-style Labour party conferences used to bully their party leadership. They suggest, rather, bishops, clergy and lay people together engaged in a respectful and careful (dare one even say prayerful) search for "God's will for his church" in matters large and small, universal and local. The right of discernment belongs ultimately to those in episcopal orders, but they need a process of grinding and sifting just as mills need grist. Clergy and laity have an indispensable role providing it.

The main reservation against existing lay participation and consultation mechanisms in the Catholic Church in England and Wales is that they do not reach out to the ordinary Catholic-in-the-pew (though the National Board of Catholic Women has made a genuine attempt to do just that.) And while it is gratifying how many excellent lay people are employed by the church in positions of authority and influence, the relationship between employee and employer is an economic and contractual one and hence not quite the right model either. What we are looking for is a suitable vehicle to express a relationship that is sacramental - the bond, called communio or koinonia, which links the Church to its members.

Hence we need instruments, structures if you like, for airing issues, engaging in discussion, sounding opinion, being frank with each other, within the boundaries of koinonia. The structures should be permanent, diocese-based (as the bishop is necessarily involved), and linked nationally. Whatever the laity say, at the end of the day the independence of the bishops has to be preserved. Hence the instruments must provide the means for dialogue and persuasion, not battlefields for winning two-thirds majorities and all the other ghastly stuff of Anglican democracy. But persuasion can be two-way. A bishop would not want to reform the pastoral strategy of his diocese, I take it, without a serious attempt to carry the people with him. The structures would supply him with a means to do that. And who knows? - he might later realise he has been saved from a serious mistake. The grace of episcopal orders alone is never going to be enough, I fear, to protect him from that.

The concept that we need is that of a "forum". It would make sense if each dioceses had a body - a local "Catholic Association", for want of a better name - whose job was to service such forums, for instance to arrange when and where they were to take place and to prepare material to be discussed. Forums would meet in all the principal towns of the diocese, on a rotating basis, but an overall limit of, say, four meetings a year per diocese would be reasonable.

Each bishop could place items on the agenda, as could the council of priests, as could the Catholic Association itself. Any Catholic could join the association; any Catholic could attend a forum, whether a member or not. I would even be tempted to let the bishop have a veto over the agenda, on the grounds that if he is not looking for advice on a certain matter it would be a waste of time offering any. But perhaps not: there are other less confrontational ways of defusing such problems. As for proceedings, the approach adopted by the National Pastoral Congress in Liverpool in 1980 has a lot to commend it. There, quality of argument seemed to matter more than the counting of heads. And there was a premium on winning critics over rather than defeating them.

In the beginning these diocesan bodies would have to rely for leadership on existing Catholic organisations in the diocese. They would be specifically invited by the bishop to help him set up the local Catholic Association. There should eventually be a small local secretariat, and a national office to which diocesan bodies could be affiliated. But these are details: what is needed in the first instance is some sort of national steering committee or working group, with episcopal blessing, to start putting flesh on this skeleton (or one not dissimilar). Let us see if we can get to first base, at least.

The full text of the lecture is available at "www.clongley.cwc.net/ fourth.html#t95"

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph MAY 12 2000

A grove dedicated to peace

A REMARKABLE CEREMONY took place at the newly refurbished Durbar Court at the Foreign Office in Whitehall on Wednesday evening, by permission of the Foreign Secretary. It was the presentation of a plaque from the Council of Christians and Jews in Britain to Pope John Paul II, received on his behalf by the papal nuncio, Archbishop Pablo Puente, and commemorating the Pope's visit to Israel in March. The plaque itself marked the gift of a grove of trees to be planted in the Pope's honour in Israel, near the ancient road to Emmaus (where Christ appeared after His resurrection).

The gift was fulsomely supported in messages from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, and the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, two of the joint presidents of the Council of Christians and Jews. It was made possible by Jewish benefactors of the Council, and it is testimony to the enormous tide of goodwill towards the present Pope in the Jewish community, quite without precedent in modern or any other times.

Above all, it was his unexpected gesture in placing a written prayer in a niche in the Western Wall in Jerusalem which so moved Jewish hearts. It is their holiest place. The fact that the Pope's prayer contained a plea for God's forgiveness for Christian sins against the Jews only added to the poignancy of his action. Jewish mouths dropped open in disbelief at that moment and have hardly closed since.

Christian mouths have been a little slower to drop open, but the implications are hardly less momentous for them. Evangelicals may wonder what has happened to the doctrine that salvation comes through Christ alone, while Anglicans and Catholics may have to look closely at their inherited understanding of what the church is. If the Pope is right - and the Archbishop of Canterbury seems entirely to agree with him - then Christianity can no longer be regarded as the religion that replaced Judaism. In Christian liturgy, prophecies in the Old Testament are still routinely read as foreshadowing the coming of Christ, with the implication that Jews have missed the point of their own scripture. References to "Israel" and "People of God" are routinely mentally translated as referring to the church, the new Chosen People. So the Old Testament seemed to have been overtaken by the New - the doctrine called "supercessionism".

It seems that mainstream Christianity, in the person of Pope, Archbishop, and most theologians and Biblical scholars of similar persuasion, are ready to abandon these traditional positions and move on. Leaving aside the issue whether such teachings have been a fertile breeding ground for anti-Semitism - the case is strong but not yet proved - the argument also prizes open what for two thousand years has been a closed question for Christian-Jewish dialogue - who was Jesus exactly, and what purpose did God have for him?

The Christian answer "the Son of God", while useful shorthand for orthodox Trinitarians, distracts attention from the recent theological "rediscovery" (if one might use such a term for what has always been obvious) that Jesus lived and died a first century Jewish male. Generations of Christians have unconsciously or deliberately seen him as "someone like us" - most recently, under the influence of feminist theology, as representative of a humanity that was half female. More notoriously, the Nazis perpetrated the myth of an Aryan Christ, provoking Pius XI to protest "We are all spiritual semites".

Some of the implications of all this are shortly to be explored in a unique conference at the Sternberg Centre in North London to be addressed by Cardinal Edward Cassidy, the gracious Irish-Australian who heads the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. The Jewish co-sponsor of the event is the World Union for Progressive Judaism, the liberal part of the Jewish community which has less difficulty about theological dialogue with Christians. The agenda faces up to questions that have been "off the table", being too sensitive, in earlier conversations, such as "What place does each faith leave for the other?" and "Are Jews and Christians both in covenant [with God]?"

This six Christian contributors to the conference have been chosen by the Vatican, which means they are unlikely to opt for easy liberal answers. On the Jewish side, that makes them all the more valuable. The ultimate questions are about the future of partnership between the two faiths, given this new theological grounding.

The Pope's gesture at the Western Wall has transformed the climate in which the conference will happen, which will therefore be less overshadowed by a series of recent misunderstandings and disappointments. The new Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Archbishop Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, will preach in a London synagogue as part of the opening proceedings, the first time that has happened.

All of which makes the Bishop of Oxford's recent remark, that believers who had difficulties with the divinity of Christ would be better off becoming Jewish rather than Unitarian, seem entirely unremarkable. But the bishop, the Right Rev Richard Harries, is not being left behind by all these Catholic-Jewish developments. For he it was who presided over the ceremony in the Durbar Court on Wednesday.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph MAY 5 2000

Teaching Christianity as true at last

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND'S POLICY towards its church schools can be likened to trying to warm up the atmosphere by running the central heating at full blast with the windows wide open. A change of a tenth of one degree within a radius of 15 yards might be detectable on a good day, while the indoor temperature drops way below comfort level. No-one could fault the selfless intentions. But rather than put in more radiators and a bigger boiler, closing the windows might be an even better idea. At last, this penny seems to have dropped.

What this thermodynamic metaphor describes is the policy sanctioned by the Durham Report of nearly 30 years ago, and still in force though now under fundamental review. The Church of England, through its sponsorship of roughly a quarter of the state primary school system, pumped spiritual energy into the nation's cultural atmosphere. Never mind whether it made any difference; it was the right thing to do. It was concerned not with educating "its own", like the Catholics in their system, but with the welfare of the general population.

It was not ungrateful. Church schools are generally oversubscribed, and perform better than average on the various league tables. The present government thinks they are wonderful (unlike numerous Old Labour LEAs.) But while such schools must make some contribution to raising the overall spiritual temperature - probably not statistically significant - what they do not do is recruit a new generation of Christians who will grow up to be adult church members. (They do not heat their own living space, as it were).

And the proof of that is the severe shortage of the essential bridge between the primary school and adulthood, the Church of England secondary school. Instead, the natural religiosity of the primary school child is quickly blown away as he or she graduates to the local (brutally secular) comprehensive.

The Durham Report - named after the bishop who chaired the committee that wrote it - was only one of a series of mistakes made by the Church of England in education, which have born bitter fruit in the long-term decline in church attendance and the increasing marginalisation of religion in English society. It was all of a piece with the complacent satisfaction that was felt after the war when it was believed the religious clauses of the 1944 Act had guaranteed for all time the religious character of the English people - because the basics of Christians doctrine were henceforth to be taught in every school. Committees of local clergy were to decide what those basics were, which is the origin of "Agreed Syllabus" scheme which is still with is.

But their nerve quickly failed them. Instead of teaching Christianity as "true", like mathematics or geography is taught, RE was gradually presented more and more as "something some people believe". The very change from "religious instruction", the phrase used in the 1944 Act, to "religious education", as used by the teaching profession, was itself a symbol. What drove this gradual shift was a positivist approach to the content of education - that only what was provable was true - and a broad cultural dislike of "indoctrination" in the light of such frightening examples of it as the Hitler Youth, still fresh in people's memories.

While this shift of emphasis was understandable in the non-denominational sector, the Durham Report also applied it to the church sector. Apart from independent schools, the only exception was the Catholic school system, which always taught its own beliefs as true with a view to producing the next generation of Catholic believers - and the proof again is that the majority of denominational secondary schools are indeed Catholic. So the religious bridge from primary school to adulthood is in place (notwithstanding the difficulty of deciding the content of the RE curriculum in such schools). The Catholic bishops reaffirmed this policy as recently as yesterday.

In 1998 Church of England's Board of Education produced a report The Church of England School in the New Millennium which at last begun to question some of the received wisdom. The General Synod liked what it saw, and asked the new Archbishops' Council to prepare a response. It in turn set up a committee, mainly of Anglican educationalists but also including the head of the Catholic Education Service, Archbishop Vincent Nichols (now of Birmingham). Lord Dearing, former head of the national curriculum authority, was made chairman, and he promised to report back by the end of this year.

More Church of England secondary schools are high on its agenda, not only by new builds but in some cases, transfers from the nondenominational sector. Also being considered is the prospect of transferring church schools from the "controlled" category to the "voluntary aided" category, which the government has made possible without extra cost to the church.

Voluntary aided status, which already applies to Catholic primary schools, enables the church to control the religious curriculum directly. At last, therefore, the Church of England can start to teach a generation of children that the Christian faith as true, not just "something some people believe." If only they had thought of it 40 years ago...

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LAYLINES
by Clifford Longley

The Tablet MAY 6 2000

Echoes of a distant commotion

RIFLING THROUGH FADED PAPERS from long ago is a special sort of pleasure. It usually comes in two forms. One is the unexpected surprise of seeing how different "long ago" was from nowadays, not only a strange physical universe but a strange mental one. The other is the equal and opposite surprise of recognition - their problems are the antecedents of our problems.

This week's celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Restoration of the Hierarchy is a not a bad moment to fish out the title deeds of the Catholic Church's official presence in this country, to see what they have to tell us. The result is a curiously disturbing impression that they do not quite add up.

As the term Restoration implies, what Rome thought it was doing in 1850 was putting back what had existed before, namely an English part of the One True Church, in full communion with the Holy See. After Reginald Pole - Nicholas Wiseman: the years between 1558 and 1850 were a prolonged period of sede vacante. Cardinal Pole, Mary Tudor's Archbishop of Canterbury, had conducted a Restoration too; James II never quite dared, and left the Anglican Settlement intact. Archbishop Wiseman's famous letter From Without the Flaminian Gate, which he sent back to England on receiving the Pope's authority to be archbishop of the new see of Westminster, was brutally clear what he was about.

"The great work, then, is completed; what you have long desired and prayed for is granted," he told the Catholic faithful in Westminster. "England has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament, from which its light had long vanished, and begins anew its course of regularly adjusted action round the centre of unity, the source of jurisdiction, of light, and of vigour."

The public outcry which greeted the papal announcement was made worse by Wiseman's arrogant language. Those were the days when the Church of England was still pretty sure of itself as "the Christian Church of the English nation", and allegiance to foreign prelates was still regarded as incompatible with total loyalty to the Crown. As fears of anti-Catholic riots and civil commotion grew - the disastrous Gordon Riots had taken place only 80 years before - Wiseman retreated, implicitly withdrawing all these grand claims and substituting something far more modest. He issued an Appeal to the Reason and Good Feeling of the English People, in which he limited his ministry purely to Catholics, especially those in want.

"Close under the Abbey of Westminster," he wrote, "there lie concealed labyrinths of lanes and courts... in which swarms a huge and almost countless population, in great measure, nominally at least, Catholic; haunts of filth, which no sewage committee can reach - dark corners which no lighting-board can brighten. This is the part of Westminster which alone I covet" and so on.

Even 150 years later, one cannot fail to be moved and excited by Wiseman's eloquent compassion, which sounds all the more vivid when one recalls that the Irish potato famine, and the mass emigration to escape from it, had hardly yet passed its peak. But the fact is in these two documents he had given the new Hierarchy not one but two title deeds, and they were hardly compatible. Either the new institutions of the Catholic Church were there to look after their own, or they were there to win the soul of the nation back to the one True Church, a vast historic project that John Henry Newman, himself not long converted, quickly entitled the "Second Spring".

There were very good reasons why the strategy of "looking after our own", prevailed over the romantic vision of a Catholic Second Spring. The Church of England had the power of the Victorian state behind it, the strongest nation in the world, and was not about to roll over. Meanwhile there were teeming Catholics mouths to feed not long out of Ireland, orphans to shelter, schools to build. In other words there was a spiritual ghetto to create and police, in which the faith of Catholics would be safe from the predatory attentions of the Protestant majority or the secular influence of the liberal intelligentsia. The rest had to be postponed.

But it was the public conversion of England, not the provision of a private Catholic welfare state, that justified the creation of new Catholic bishoprics. You cannot have several Successors of the Apostles in any one place, preaching different Gospels. If there is more than one claimant, then someone must be mistaken. The Church of England was quite right to protest in 1850: it was indeed being usurped and in this respect its ecclesiology was correct; and so was Wiseman's in his Flaminian Gate letter. There can only be a single One True Church.

The incompatibilities between Wiseman's two basic strategies for the Catholic Church in England and Wales are still with us, still unresolved, exerting a powerful influence. But because conflicts of identity are difficult things to live with, they have been suppressed to the subconscious level where their presence is visible largely by their effects. One such effect is to make English Catholics unsure of themselves, which may partly explain the present reports of poor clergy morale and declining mass attendance. It makes it much more difficult to answer the pressing question - one's teenage children's question, often enough - "What exactly is the point of being a Catholic today?"

It is not question Wiseman would have hesitated to answer. But his answers no longer work. The Catholic Church seems to need a Third Way between Wiseman's two strategies, between "converting the nation" back to Rome and "looking after its own". It needs to decide how to "be the Church" in the 21st century, not the 19th, and how to organise itself accordingly.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph APRIL 28 2000

When Middle England seethed

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO Middle England was seething. All over the country local dignitaries - gentry, magistrates, MPs, aldermen, parish clergy, even lord lieutenants - convened public meetings in response to the popular clamour. As many as 7,000 such events took place, always packed and rowdy, often ending with a tumultuous chorus of God Save the Queen and a final appeal to the public not to take the law into their own hands (not always observed.)

It was called by John Henry Newman "a national commotion, almost without parallel, more violent than has happened here for centuries". What caused it was the appointment - also termed a "Restoration of the Hierarchy" - of Roman Catholic bishops for England and Wales. It needed only a cynical bit of stirring by the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, and some aggrieved editorialising in the press, to set opinion in the country aflame.

Next week the event is to be modestly celebrated by the same English and Welsh hierarchy the fuss was all about, with a mass in Westminster Cathedral and vespers in London's other Catholic cathedral, St George's in Southwark. The centenary commemoration in 1950 had been on a far larger scale, with a grand event in Wembley Stadium. But such triumphalism no longer reflects the mood.

What particularly inflamed opinion in 1850 was the provocative way the Restoration was announced, with enough ambiguity to suit those who wanted to make trouble. They represented it as an attempt by Rome to declare England a Catholic country again, against the will of the great majority of the population. The new Catholic leader, Archbishop Wiseman, having given this impression then quickly denied it, saying his only business was with the Catholic poor. But Rome's implicit dismissal of the Church of England as having any relevance to the salvation of English souls was taken as an affront, above all, to the Queen, the national church's Supreme Governor (widely, if inaccurately, described as its head).

So the indignation was patriotic at least as much as it was religious. Even Catholic peers of the realm were dismayed - the Duke of Norfolk of the time went on strike, becoming a temporary Anglican. The old Catholic families felt it was they, and not some new-fangled bishops appointed by the Pope, who should control the affairs of the Catholic community.

And it undoubtedly all went back to Mary Tudor, she who was known as Bloody. In the great battle for the soul of the kingdom which dominated the 16th century, the five-year reign of Henry VIII's eldest daughter had handed the Protestant side in the conflict an unanswerable case. How do Catholics behave if you give them political power? They burn people alive. The argument that the Protestant James I burnt more witches than Catholic Mary burnt heretics is beside the point, for this was a propaganda battle not a factual one. So is the fact that by the final reckoning more Catholics were executed for being Catholics than Protestants for being Protestants, for historical and political developments had conspired by then to make a fatal connection between Catholicism and treason.

The most dangerous confusion at the time of the Reformation was that between state and church. Any rejection of the authority of the official religion amounted to a rejection of the authority of the state itself. When Catholicism had a monopoly, as in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, there was no problem. But the new religious ideologies also demanded supremacy and conformity. In a Catholic state, a Protestant was a political enemy; in a Protestant state, a Catholic was. A Protestant view of Elizabeth I saw her as Good Queen Bess, Gloriana, the Virgin Queen; a Catholic view saw her as tyrant, usurper and murderer. The truth contained all those ingredients; but that wasn't a synthesis the English public of 1850 was interested in. What they saw was "Papal Aggression", to quote the title of an intemperate leading article in The Times.

Protestant bigotry and Catholic absolutism have often been symbiotic, each fuelling the other. The Pope having set an example in these matters, next week's occasion would be a suitable one for the English Catholic authorities to break the vicious circle by acknowledging that it takes two to quarrel, and that the Catholic Church - or at least the sons and daughters thereof, to use the Pope's expression - had sometimes fallen short of the highest ideals.

The statement on human rights the Catholic bishops of England and Wales issued in 1998 admitted as much when it stated: "It must also be acknowledged that in the name of the Catholic religion terrible wrongs were done, for example, to Protestants at the time of the Reformation in Great Britain." It went widely unreported. Perhaps the time has come to say a little more, and finally bury the hatchet altogether and for ever. Some collective memories still need healing, but first they may need bringing to the surface. Pope John Paul II has demonstrated how powerful that process can be.

And then, maybe, the Church of England might have something to add. It was not entirely blameless either.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph APRIL 21 2000

Tory bridge to the churches just holds

WILLIAM HAGUE'S SPEECH at an Evangelical youth festival in Minehead, Somerset, on Monday was more than a political side-show. It represented the launch of one key plank of the Conservative party's platform for the next general election. He is preparing to make the claim that it stands for traditional Judaeo-Christian "family values", against the politically correct secularism and moral relativism of Labour.

We can expect to hear much more of this, not least because Mr Hague and his friends were overwhelmed with the warmth of the reception they received at Monday's event - called "Spring Harvest" and billed, with traditional Evangelical hyperbole, as "the biggest Christian celebration in Europe".

But there is more to it than meets the eye. Mr Hague should note that the politics of religion in the United States - manifested in the Christian Coalition's support for the Republicans - is really the politics of abortion. Is he ready for that? It is a far tougher issue for a British politician to handle than Section 28 (ask Tony Blair about Cardinal Winning).

The Conservative party's diagnosis of its failure at the last election included the point that church opinion had become increasingly alienated during the Thatcher and Major years. So Mr Hague set in train his "Listening to Britain's Churches" consultation, in which a pivotal role was given to the revamped Conservative Christian Fellowship. Its chairman, Gary Streeter, is a member of Mr Hague's front bench team as shadow for Clare Short.

It emerged from the consultation that one issue symbolised church hostility to the Conservatives more than any other - the treatment of refugees. The Asylum and Immigration Act of 1996 stripped asylum seekers of their right to benefits. Refugee questions had until then been marginal to the concerns of church leaders. Suddenly there was desperate talk of soup kitchens, temporary hostels, and opening church premises in London for thousands of homeless foreigners. Then the High Court stepped in, and ruled that local authorities had a legal duty to support those without any other entitlement to benefits.

Until this week, the Conservative party had not said whether it intended to go back to this policy or not. Michael Howard, the Home Secretary in the last Conservative Government, had been urging it to do so in a recent letter to the Daily Telegraph and an article in the Sunday Telegraph. Had they won the last election, he said, the right of refugees to support from local authorities would have been ended, if necessary by another Act.

Had Mr Hague adopted that policy, however, his entire "Listening to Britain's Churches" exercise would have foundered. So, therefore, would the strategy of making the Conservative party the natural home of the Judaeo-Christian ethic. Those who know Gary Streeter think he would have had to resign, thereby providing ammunition for Labour's current tactic of branding the Tories as extreme. Of all Tory spokesmen, he has marked out a personal position on asylum seekers somewhat more moderate in tone than that used by, say, Anne Widdecombe.

You don't need to be a theologian to know that the duty of hospitality to strangers is a central component of the Judaeo-Christian ethic. The violation of that duty was the real sin of Sodom for which God destroyed it - Biblical scholars now agree that it was not primarily about homosexuality, but about the abuse of strangers. It is an old Jewish custom to set an empty seat at the dinner table, representing the unknown stranger who is always welcome. The Holy Family were sheltered as refugees to Egypt, to avoid Herod's Massacre of the Innocents. And so on... such things go deep.

Thus Mr Howard's policy was unceremoniously dropped, and on Tuesday a clever U-turn was carried out under the very guns of the media (which failed to notice). The calculation was that a policy of reception camps and removal squads, put forward as being in the interests of asylum seekers themselves, was not likely to strain relations with the churches to breaking point whereas one of leaving refugees destitute would have done so.

That was a good call. The churches know poverty intimately because it rings their doorbells late at night or stops them in the street. Under Mr Howard's policy, inner city clergy imagined their homes packed with hungry Somalis or Kurds. They would have done their best, while cursing Michael Howard to hell and back - whereas Mr Hague's position since Tuesday is just one more policy they may not agree with. It is no longer the defining issue (as The Tablet last week warned Mr Hague it could again become.)

So the rapprochement with the churches has not been derailed. There is mileage in morality - but as this case illustrates, it is not an easy furrow to plough. Nor will the churches necessarily welcome the politicisation of religion, which risks driving Labour into the opposite camp. And perhaps it is not so much to America that the Tories should look for lessons, but to European Christian Democracy. All the problems lying ahead for Mr Hague are there to be seen, and a very uneven picture it is.

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LAYLINES
by Clifford Longley

The Tablet APRIL 15 2000

Calling business to account

SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH CLOSING nearly 200 of its smaller branches, Barclays bank has been running an expensive press and tv advertising campaign telling us how big and successful it is. So counter-productive is this likely to prove, however, one could be excused for thinking the whole thing has been paid for, surreptitiously, by its rival Nat West. Emphasising the bigness of Barclays merely emphasises the smallness of the rest of us, and hence the pointlessness of complaining about bad service or unfair charging - or the closure of our local branch.

Yet as Will Hutton wrote in the Observer this week, it is futile to blame Barclays' management. Banks have to please their shareholders, which means pleasing the stock exchange. Talk of bigness is designed to discourage predatory take-overs, such as Nat West has just succumbed to; and closing branches is good for the share price because it promises a leaner profile and bigger profits.

Hutton argues that there needs to be a renewed debate about the concept of "stakeholders" - those other parties than shareholders, such as customers, employees and the wider community, who also have a moral stake in a company but at present have no legal standing to enforce it. The concept of stakeholding - entirely in sympathy with Catholic social teaching - emerged briefly in the run-up to the last election, when Tony Blair looked as if he was about to make it party policy. But Labour's determination not to do anything to scare businessmen away saw the idea quietly dropped.

"Shareholders' property rights are not absolute, those shareholders live in society too, and the exercise of their rights is subject to the claims of others..." Hutton asserts, in language strikingly reminiscent of the social encyclicals of recent Popes. He suggests that every firm should have a legal duty to publish an annual "social audit" setting out how it has discharged its responsibilities to employees, customers and the community. There is a case for going further, and bringing all those other interests within the legal duties of company directors under company law, alongside shareholders. Rather than pursuing profit at all costs, they would then have a duty to balance profits against the claims of other stakeholders. This would bring about a sea-change in management culture. At the moment, a manager who raises questions about the wider impact of company policy is likely to be told that it is none of his business. On the contrary, the presumption should be that it is his business.

As some American analysts of the business world have pointed out, shareholders have been given certain artificial privileges by society. The company they own can trade as a corporate personality - make contracts, sue and be sued, just like a private individual - with the privilege of limited liability. If a company goes bust, shareholders are allowed to cut their losses. If I go bust as an individual, I am liable to lose my shirt. These concessions put a company owned by its shareholders in a special class. It also puts them in society's debt. Without the invention of limited liability, shareholder capitalism would never have become the successful engine of economic growth it has proved to be. But in return for society giving shareholders this legal protection against personal bankruptcy, they have a firm and solid obligation to pay society back. They are in receipt of a valuable benefit. It is time society extracted the price.

The heart of the modern problem of capitalism is that the very mechanism of shareholding in a limited liability company separates the owner of wealth from the use that is made of it, whether the owner likes it or not. When shareholder capitalism started, owners could take a personal interest in how their company was managed, and could feel some personal responsibility for it. It is true there are certain investment funds which advertise themselves as "ethical" and try to take account of social responsibility issues in their investment policy. That meets the case of the scrupulous investor, who is not prepared to hand over total control regardless of the consequences. The real problem raised by Barclays bank and numerous other examples is not how to address the qualms of an individual investor's conscience, however, but how to recognise the rights of society.

The major portion of wealth on the London stock exchange is not owned by shareholders directly, but through intermediate institutions like banks, pension funds, insurance companies and unit trusts. So the link connecting the owner of wealth with the use made of that wealth has become so complicated that it no can longer operate as an effective control mechanism. And in the absence of any personal control by shareholders, the assumption is made by managers that the only thing a shareholder is interested in is profit. This is not a fact but a convenient fiction, as the Barclays case well illustrates. Many of those protesting at the closure of Barclays branches are likely, through these intermediate bodies, to be part owners of Barclays themselves - without even knowing it or being able to do anything about it.

Thus there is an unpaid debt to society because of the legal privileges given to business. And the connection between the ownership of invested wealth, and the responsibility for how it is used, has been broken. These defects of capitalism are more than enough to justify Will Hutton's call for legal recognition of the position of other stakeholders than the shareholders.

A company owned by its shareholders may legally be treated as a corporate personality. But unless its aims are widened to embrace other considerations than pure profit, that corporate "person" is likely to behave as a thoroughly irresponsible citizen.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph APRIL 14 2000

The sound of mutli-faith Britain

IF ONE HANGS ABOUT the religious corners of this nation long enough, sooner or later one will hear the sound of multi-faith Britain working. Anglicans will be heard exclaiming "Thank goodness for the Roman Catholics!" or Catholics "Thank goodness for the Chief Rabbi!" A party of Jewish friends comes back aglow from a visit to a London mosque... and so on.

Just as Britain has recently been awarded the interesting accolade of having the highest incidence of multi-racial marriages in the world, so Britain could reasonably aspire to being recognised as the most religiously tolerant country in the world. There are a whole lot of new reasons here for being proud of being British.

It is in this context that one should view the report, commissioned by the Home Office, into the possible character of a multi-faith Coronation Service. It would see the incoming Monarch crowned not as Defender of the Anglican Faith but as Defender of All Faiths. In the same context comes the proposal, in the Wakeham Commission for House of Lords reform, that seats should be found for representatives of other religious communities than the Anglican one.

These two suggestions, taken together, would enable the British constitution to become what it has always wanted to be and actually was before the Reformation, an embodiment of the nation's moral and spiritual values rather than purely civic and political ones. This was even the dream of the Elizabethan Settlement in the 16th century, somewhat undermined by that Queen's tendency to have her Roman Catholic subjects hung drawn and quartered.

But is tolerance enough? If I as a Catholic want to see the Coronation embodying my core values, and a Methodist or Hindu wants to see it embodying their core values, do I switch off with a polite smile while they have their moment, and they switch off similarly while I have mine? If so, the idea that the symbolic institutions of the state can represent them all at once is no more convincing than the constitutional fiction that the Queen becomes a Presbyterian when she is north of the Scottish border. We have to do better than that.

The cosy liberal idea that all religions can be herded together on the basis of a lowest common denominator where morality is concerned, or syncretism where myth and ritual is concerned, is actually harmful to religion. It leads to the conclusion that if all religions are equally true, they must all be equally false.

It would be better not to be guided by liberal lights here, though that is the easy route. The conservative route is slower, more painful but more rewarding. When Jews watched the almost unbelievable spectacle of Pope John Paul II placing a prayer asking forgiveness for Christian sins in a niche in the Western Wall in Jerusalem, they knew this was no mere tolerant gesture. It was a profound doctrinal statement that in the eyes of the leader of the Christian religion, the Jewish direct route to God is still open, the Jewish religion still works, the Old Covenant still stands. Such things are not said lightly, which is why they have not been said for 2,000 years.

A conservative approach does not dismiss the idea that all religious systems contain a hierarchy of truths, doctrines which are central and doctrines which are more marginal. But they are often confused about which is which. Christians used generally to believe that because members of other faiths did not bow down at the name of Christ, they were all from the devil. A wiser tradition - St Francis of Assisi, for instance - saw that they too contained religious truth, and that God used them to reach people who were out of reach of Christianity. The sages of all the major faiths have observed that people may think they seek God by means of faith, whereas in reality it is God who seeks them. This realisation is a common moment of enlightenment.

It is in those areas where the great religions of the world most profoundly agree that they may confidently state they are closest to God. It is this insight which they can employ to discover and refine their own hierarchy of truths, distinguishing teachings which are essential to God's purposes from those which are less so. This is a mutual service to the truth, and it explains why in the divine dispensation, different religions exist side by side. Different religions have something to teach each other that they could not readily discover by other means.

Though it is not a good idea to turn such an idea into a new dogma, it does seem to me to be implicitly present already in the way the great faiths of the world now relate to each other. They see each other as having something precious to bring to the common banquet, something they need. And nowhere more so than in contemporary, multi-faith Britain. It is not their lowest common denominator we want, therefore, but their highest common factor - their sense of God. The challenge is to find the right vehicle to celebrate and confirm that above all, while preserving their distinctive integrity.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph APRIL 7 2000

Anglican Communion on the brink

ACCORDING TO THE CHURCH TIMES, last week's meeting in Portugal of the leaders of the 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion pulled them back from the brink of rupture. This may be optimistic: the pressure continues to build. Some Episcopalian (Anglican) dioceses in the United States still intend to ordain practising homosexuals this summer, which may trigger a counter-stroke by American conservatives and their Third World allies.

This distinctively Anglican brew is becoming increasingly complicated, which may be why virtually no coverage if the Anglican primates' meeting appeared in the British secular media - plus the fact the primates pursued a deliberate policy of non-cooperation with the press. The crisis in the Anglican Communion is becoming a private sorrow, therefore, which will only be visible above the national horizon if it spreads to England. Which it may well do.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, whose job it is to keep the show in the road, has handled the problem with great skill so far. But it may not be resolvable. Two years ago the Lambeth Conference passed resolutions designed to unite the Anglican Communion round a conservative and Biblical version of Christian sexual ethics. Not surprisingly, the most liberal parts of world Anglicanism went their own way regardless.

This prompted one of the chief conservatives, Archbishop Moses Tay of the Anglican province of South East Asia, to boycott last September's meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council in Scotland. His greatest scorn was reserved for Bishop Richard Holloway, primus of Scotland, who has repeatedly said that homosexual relationships between priests are acceptable.

American Episcopalians are deeply divided over homosexuality. Some traditionalists decided to borrow the Church of England's idea of "flying bishops" to provide an alternative episcopal ministry to those who found their local bishop too liberal. They arranged for two of their number to be consecrated as bishops by Archbishop Tay and the Archbishop of Rwanda, Dr Emmanuel Kolini, in Singapore in January. Dr Carey strongly denounced what they had done, calling it "irresponsible and irregular". He returned to the attack on a letter to the primates in February.

This was the crisis which dominated the Portugal meeting and more than half of the communiqué issued afterwards. Both the rebel archbishops were present. It made the point, unanimously, it seems, that disagreements on sexual teaching are not in themselves sufficient reason to break off communion between member churches, though it could "impair" that communion - not enough to break the Anglican Communion into pieces but nevertheless leave it divided. The primates reaffirmed that the basis of the unity of the Anglican Communion was still the so-called Lambeth Quadrilateral, which was adopted by the Lambeth Conference in 1888 in response to the Colenso crisis.

Only a "formal and public repudiation" of this formula would place a diocese or province outside the Anglican Communion, they stated. The Quadrilateral lays down that the Communion consists of churches who accept "the Holy Scriptures as the rule and standard of faith; the creeds of the undivided Church; the two Sacraments ordained by Christ himself and the historic episcopate."

There is certainly a difference over the interpretation of Scripture on homosexuality, but the real threat lies elsewhere. Dr Carey has insisted that belief in the "historic episcopate" does not just mean having bishops. It means accepting the territorial integrity of dioceses, stopping one bishop interfering in another bishop's affairs without his (on in the American case, her) permission. That is exactly what Archbishops Tay and Kolini have done - formally and publicly - by consecrating two American priests to work as bishops inside the territory of other bishops.

The Portugal meeting left it to the three primates - Tay, Kolini and the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States, Bishop Frank Griswold - to try to agree what was to happen to the two extra-territorial American bishops, John Rodgers and Charles Murphy. But the likelihood of liberal American bishops allowing some conservative parishes to opt out of their jurisdiction in protest at their ordination of homosexuals is a thin one. They would regard that as condoning "the sin of homophobia".

Though they are among the Anglican Communion's most generous financial supporters, American bishops do not consider themselves bound by decisions of the Lambeth Conference, let alone of the primates' meeting. The most radical of them believe the Lambeth Conference in 1998 was overtaken by fundamentalist hysteria against homosexuality, and they make it a matter of principle to oppose it. Primates like Tay and Kolini are just as adamant the other way. They wanted a statement condemning the American church for failing to follow the Lambeth Conference line on homosexuality.

The primates may have postponed the crisis, therefore, but all the components are still in place. Although he personally accepts the Lambeth Conference's resolution on homosexuality, Dr Carey may yet find himself having to suspend some Third World provinces from the Anglican Communion for being too zealous in its pursuit, in order to keep the Americans on board. And nothing would be more likely to inflame the smouldering quarrel over homosexuality in the Church of England, his own backyard.

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LAYLINES
by Clifford Longley

The Tablet APRIL 1 2000

Tying the royal knot

CAN A MAN HONOUR THE INSTITUTION of marriage by keeping a mistress? That paradoxical question is prompted by the conduct of the heir to the throne. It has been reported that the Prince of Wales and Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles spent last weekend together at Sandringham. They were seen attending a concert in a local church, and they smiled and waved at crowds who had turned out for the occasion.

This, we were informed, was the latest of their increasingly relaxed public appearances together since the first was stage-managed for the benefit of press photographers a year ago. A recent public opinion poll showed that almost half the public is now ready to see him wed Mrs Parker-Bowles, though a much larger number do not want her ever to be queen. (Nor has she shown the slightest inclination to be so, and some way could surely be devised to meet everybody's wishes). Newspapers routinely describe her as his "mistress" or his "lover" - the latter term was in a Reuters agency report on Monday, which therefore went round the world.

It is, to say the least, a little bit embarrassing. The papers are surely right that a public relations campaign is being conducted to accustom us to the idea that the Prince and Camilla are, as they say, a unit. But nothing has been said, even hinted at, about marriage.

She is a divorced lady. The remarriage of divorced persons in church during the lifetime of the previous spouse is contrary to the current rules of the Church of England, though it is well known these rules are widely broken and the House of Bishops of the General Synod is reviewing them. It would be in the Prince's nature not to want to pre-empt that review. He is said to continue to have a high regard for the principles of Christian marriage, while acknowledging that he fell short of them in his own marriage to the late Princess of Wales. In so far as he could, he would still want to uphold those principles.

We may accept that he did not marry Diana while intending to be unfaithful with Mrs Parker-Bowles, with whom he had had an earlier affair when they were both single. He sought comfort in her arms only as his marriage broke down. He was weak and selfish no doubt. But by all accounts, even her own, Diana was a difficult person to be married to (and a marriage tribunal canon lawyer might even say impossible). None of these are grounds for any of us to feel morally superior.

But for how much longer can the leaders of the Church of England, or for that matter the Catholic Church, condone the present situation (even by their silence)? It does seem that so far they have spontaneously decided on the Nelson touch, but if there really is a policy of increasingly visibility for Prince Charles and his companion, that will not be possible much longer. One cannot turn a blind eye to something staring one in the face.

Without moralising, there are good reasons for regarding the present situation, and the prospect of it being indefinitely continued into the future, with serious misgivings. Prince Charles isn't really upholding the sanctity of marriage by his behaviour, though we can accept that that is his intention. If anything he is undermining it. Those who think sexual relationships outside marriage are just as "valid" as within marriage have a right royal example to turn to.

This is all the more so because, as heir to the English Throne, he is also heir to the title and responsibility of Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Whatever an Anglican bishop might want to say about the importance of fidelity within marriage, or the illicitness of sex outside marriage, is contradicted by the behaviour of the next Supreme Governor. The tabloids would have a field day. So the public relations campaign to persuade us to see nothing untoward in the liaison of Camilla and Charles is in effect a public relations campaign in favour of the acceptability of mistresses in general. It is, unwittingly but necessarily, a public relations campaign against marriage.

This is a messy world, and most of the conventions about sexual behaviour are crumbling round our ears. But that does not mean we throw in our hand. Without abandoning all moral standards, the principle of gradualness can still be a useful guide. Once people's sexual lives have departed from the straight and narrow, the return to an ideal situation in one giant step is not always possible and sometimes actually undesirable. The correct advice is to move in the right direction, and not to make the best the enemy of the good (as Cardinal Hume used to say).

There really is no case for insisting that Camilla and Charles should separate for ever, to cease to love and comfort each other except from afar. To demand such a thing in the name of Christian principles would strike most people as thoroughly perverse and cruel. Instead, they should move in the direction of marrying as soon as possible, humbly recognising that the outcome will still fall short of perfection but that imperfection is sometimes the best we can do and God will not reject us for it. And if God would not condemn them, church leaders should not do so in His name.

Meanwhile we the public would quickly move on and put the whole Charles-Camilla-Diana crisis behind us. At present, that is precisely what we cannot do. And Prince Charles can't either.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph MARCH 31 2000

Drugs and the common good

BRITAIN HAS THE WORST RATE of teenage pregnancy in Europe, the worst incidence of drug abuse, and the lowest figures for church attendance. Each is rising dramatically (or on the last case, falling). A connection or a coincidence?

One thing does not cause the other. Getting people back into church is not the answer. But it is possible these symptom flow from another, more fundamental, factor, which is the real explanation of all of them.

Of these three, the decline in religious practice is the best clue. It is closely connected with a shift of focus in people's view of themselves and the society to which they belong. They are moving way from an ethic summed up in John Donne's famous "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent". In that model, the most important part of personal identity was that which was drawn from the community. In the case of the English, the model was full of unspoken assumptions about duty, responsibility, Queen and country. What one owed to society came before what one owed to oneself.

The Church of England was an institution symbolising a kind of idealised national identity, almost subconsciously. Monarchy played the same role. Part of being English was to honour them, even if the honouring was in the breach. On the whole, the English respected royalty, did not take drugs, did not get pregnant before marriage. If they went regularly to church it wasn't because they had thrashed out a religious view of the world for themselves. It was because they belonged to a community which took certain things for granted..

None of these decisions was made purely on the basis of "what suits me". A sizeable element was "what society expects of me." So it wasn't the direct result of going to church which stopped one getting pregnant or taking drugs, and I would be surprised if a single parson addressed a single sermon to either of those matters throughout the entire 1950s. Nor is this simply the collapse of taboo and stigma. It is a shift from looking outwards to looking inwards - and possibly the one causal connection with religion is that a totally inward-looking, personally self-serving ethic is incompatible with belief in a universal moral presence which can see into every human heart.

Individualism is the name for the process that turns one's moral gaze from society to oneself. It makes "what suits me" overwhelmingly important, so that "what society expects of me" hardly matters. In cultural terms, its presence is above all through advertising, the creation and satisfaction of transient needs. The political name for individualism is libertarianism, which asks the rhetorical question "What right have you to tell me how to behave?"

In economic terms, libertarianism manifests itself as laissez faire capitalism and the "rolling back of the state" through deregulation and lower taxes. Hence without a successful effort to reverse the trend from "what society expects of me" to "what suits me", William Hague's case for lower taxes on moral grounds is logically flawed and morally dishonest. It is an attempt to advocate as unselfish a policy whose basic appeal is to selfishness.

Yet no-one knows how to reverse that trend. If they did, the Church of England would have stumbled on it long ago and the churches would have filled up again. Indeed, to hold on to those it has, the Church of England has itself had to embrace the culture of individual gratification, putting an emphasis in its worship on an immediate emotional and spiritual lift. If Mr Hague knew which switch to pull, drugs would not be the problem they are, and girls would stay virgins until 20. Instead, religion, drug and sex have become three competing fixes for the cravings of the moment, regardless of the future or the consequences for anyone else.

It is by no means just from the right that the individual's duty to society has been undermined. Feminism has taught a whole generation of women that the traditional female ethic of "others first, self second", was a form of exploitation. The feminist antidote, urged almost as a moral duty, was to say "self first, others second". The argument that this is what men had always said is, of course, the key feminist deceit. On the contrary, men have been dragged towards an ethos of self-satisfaction by the example of what has happened to women. We are all feminists now. And when did a feminist ever talk about the common good?

There is no way back to the 1950s, of course, but there should be less shame about asserting the claims of the community over the individual. The widespread use of certain drugs alters society as well as the individual, and those of us who do not use drugs have a right to live in a society that has not been damaged in that way. The pregnant teenager is not "nothing to do with me", and it isn't "her life, she can do with it whatever she likes", any more than mine is. She and I are a piece of the continent, part of the main.

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SACRED AND PROFANE
by Clifford Longley

The Daily Telegraph MARCH 24 2000

New era in church relations

THIS WEEK'S IMAGES OF THE POPE visiting Palestinian refugees, and then greeting Jewish survivors of the Nazis at the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, were moving and memorable. What the Pope "said" by his presence and his gestures could never be contained in a mere text.

So too with Wednesday's enthronement of Archbishop Cormac Murphy-O'Connor as Archbishop of Westminster. He refused to let anybody kneel in front of him to kiss his ring, He cracked a joke or two: the warm body language with which he greeted Anglican and other religious leaders was striking. These are old and dear friends, it said. The pleasure on Lord Runcie's face was unmistakable.

There is a connection between hours spent in solitary prayer, and the ability to see, know and care for the hidden real person in those one meets. It is to do, perhaps, with the control of ego. One who deeply believes in God and who spends an hour in His presence cannot come away feeling self-important. The rest of us quickly pick up the signs that here is someone different.

This was Cardinal Hume's great gift. What made him the most effective English church leader since the war, with the possible exception of Archbishop Michael Ramsey, was his transparent holiness and goodness.

In a sense, Archbishop Cormac Murphy-O'Connor has only to go on doing what he did in Sussex and his predecessor did in London, and he will be a success. But the moment has a greater potential than that. Partly this is because of the almost simultaneous promotion of Vincent Nichols to Birmingham. There is a synergy between these two appointments with implications for the nation as a whole.

For instance, the Church of England is having to readjust its relationship to English society in the light of secularisation and falling church numbers. The new way of "being the church" that this will require is in fact closer to the way the Catholic Church has learned to conduct itself. It means, for instance, not taking power and influence for granted but working for it, sometimes from below. Strange alliances have to be made, opportunities grasped, deals done, concessions extracted. It also means standing back a little from English society and culture, seeking the right critical distance and being prepared if necessary to be distinctive enough to upset people.

The Church of England has also learned from the Catholic Church in more profound ways, and here Archbishop Murphy-O'Connor has already played a role. It is becoming aware that "being the national Church" is not enough of a definition, when the nation is palpably post-Christian. The identity Anglicanism is struggling towards is closer to that spelt out in the reports of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) of which Archbishop Murphy-O'Connor is one of the two chairmen. It is theologically a more rigorous approach than Anglicans have been used to, and that is through the influence of Catholic theology, particularly Vatican II theology.

Secondly, the Catholic Church has another rich body of teaching the Church of England wants to share, its so-called social teaching. When the Catholic bishops brought out their report The Common Good in 1996, many Anglican leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, were generous in their praise. There is much more work needing to be done in this area. But Archbishop Nichols was more heavily involved in the 1996 project than Archbishops Murphy-O'Connor. It is more likely to be his speciality in future.

Thirdly, the Catholic Church itself has yet to take seriously the theology of ARCIC - this time largely Anglican-inspired - about the role of the laity in the church. One recent ARCIC statement (issued above the signature of Archbishop Murphy-O'Connor) declared: "Because of their baptism and their participation in the sensus fidelium the laity play an integral part in decision-making in the Church." That is an Anglican truism, but in the Catholic Church it is just not the case. Archbishop Murphy-O'Connor has yet to indicate how he is going to apply the principles he has already signed up to in this area.

Finally, education. For all the talk of declining church numbers and poor clergy morale, the church sector (25 per cent of the whole) remains an outstanding success. The Government would like it to expand. At primary level, they are mainly Anglican; at secondary level, mainly Catholic. Either way, many pupils and their parents are only nominally Christian. And despite their official description, some of these schools have a large Muslim presence.

There is an important national debate to be had about these schools: what it is about their religious ethos that helps them succeed, what they should be doing about teaching religion itself, and so on. It has to be an Anglican-Catholic conversation, as each of them has only part of the answer. Again, this has been more Archbishop Nichols' area than Archbishop Murphy-O'Connor's.

Both have excellent relations with the Church of England. All the ingredients are in place, therefore, for a new era in church co-operation, in aid of the common good. We have seen what they can do separately. Now we shall see if they can do better together.

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