Praying for an acquittal?

From Colette Browne’s column in today’s Irish Independent:

If you want to know what rape culture looks like there is no more evocative image than a church full of the faithful bowing their heads and being asked to pray for the acquittal of a man charged with serious sexual offences.

As Cork's former lord mayor, John Murray, stood trial for the sexual assault of a teenager last week, a priest celebrating a funeral Mass in another part of the city used the occasion to pray for his exoneration.

The inference was clear. An innocent elderly man, a stalwart of the community, was facing scurrilous charges from a lying, scheming woman. She should not be believed.

But the jury did believe her and returned a unanimous guilty verdict. Today Murray, who first sexually assaulted the victim when she was just 13, is in prison awaiting sentence.

I can’t help feeling a little sceptical at this.

First, when was the last time you heard the prayers of the faithful at Mass calling for a trial jury to reach a certain verdict? The prayers of the faithful are usually much vaguer than that. And they usually have do with groups of people rather than individuals. “We pray for the sick, that they may experience the comfort of your love and find strength in their deepest need .” Is a typical prayer of the faithful. “We pray that Mary O’Byrne from up the road gets the all-clear in her scan next Wednesday” is not. And even when individual people are singled out, the prayers for them are usually of a general nature. “We pray for Mary O’Byrne, that she find strength and healing ...”

Second, none of the reports of the incident seem to mention exactly what Fr Crean – a retired Augustinian missionary, who apparently knew Murray personally - said. His words were not recorded. The Independent’s initial report of the incident yesterday did not mention any call for an acquittal. It merely noted that Fr Crean “used one of the Prayers of Intercession last Thursday to remember John Murray who served as Lord Mayor of Cork in 1993/94.” The Provincial of the Augustinians, Fr Hennebry, is quoted as saying that the prayer was “wholly inappropriate”, and the Bishop of Cork and Ross says they were “inappropriate and offensive”. He does say that “the comments were to do with a case that was before the courts.” But he does not say what the “comments” were.

“Remembering” X in a prayer is a very, very different thing from praying that the jury in X’s criminal trial return a verdict of Not Guilty.

Incidentally, here is shining piece of journalism from that earlier Independent report:

The Cotter family admitted they were appalled that an emotional family event should be used for such a prayer.

"We are all in shock. We didn't comprehend at first what had been said. I didn't hear it...when we went back (for the funeral meal) I heard things that were being said. One person asked me who was the man they were praying for so he could get off on the charges?"

"I was confused...I didn't know what they were talking about. If I had known then what I know now I would have approached him (the priest)."

She said the Cotter family were very appreciative of the fact people respected them enough not to walk out over the comments.

A few questions. Who is the “she” being quoted here? Was she at the Mass? If so, why did she not hear the words from the priest that the Independent thinks were so outrageous? Could Mr Riegel not find a more authoritave witness, i.e. someone who actually remembers what Fr Crean said at first hand? It appears not.

So what Fr Crean actually said remains a mystery. He may indeed have asked people to pray for Murray’s acquittal , but if he did, we have not seen much evidence of it. Naturally, that doesn’t stop our hard-headed, objective media from jumping to conclusions.

Benedict XVI and the commentariat

I’ve just finished reading Benedict XVI: Commander of the Faith, Rupert Shortt’s biography of the Pope Emeritus. First published in 2005, it’s quite a slim volume at 164 pages. One thing that interested me about it was its author: Rupert Shortt wrote an extremely important, though also rather chilling, book last year called Christianophobia. That book deals with the persecution of Christians in various countries of the world and is well-written and researched. The idea of Shortt applying his keen intelligence and writing skills to the Pope Emeritus’s life was an enticing one.

Benedict XVI: Commander of the Faith is more an intellectual biography than an account of the last Pope’s life. One section deals with Joseph Ratzinger’s academic career; another with his experiences at the Second Vatican Council; another with his term as Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982; another with his time as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; another with his career as polemicist and author of books critical of modern liberalism, such as the Ratzinger Report; and another with the beginning of his pontificate.

The book has been praised for its even-handedness, and it does try to give both sides of each question it discusses. Yet sometimes Shortt seems unable to avoid seeing the world through liberal-tinted glasses. He devotes a great deal of space to the supposed silencing and browbeating of priests and theologians who incurred the censure of the CDF. He is given to generous and uncritical quotes from the Tablet, without acknowledging how far to the Catholic left that paper is. (The Pill’s Robert Mickens is quoted approvingly on a couple of occasions; this is the man who, as Damian Thompson likes to remind us, once whined that Benedict XVI was “not a trained liturgist,”, a complaint that makes it difficult to take anything else Mr Mickens has to say seriously.) He describes an incident at a papal Mass in Bavaria in the 1980’s, when a young woman giving a welcoming address to John Paul II departed from her script in order to berate him about celibacy and women priests, as a “victory for free speech”. (As if one could not constantly read similar criticisms of John Paul in newspapers throughout the western world!)

In one passage, he refers to a decision Cardinal Ratzinger made as “unpopular.” Unpopular with whom, the reader wonders? The next paragraph gives the answer: “commentators” had apparently been dismayed by it. Oh. Commentators. Those infallible oracles of Catholic truth. Better fall into line, then.

Still, the book gives some useful background information about Benedict’s life and some of his major theological and intellectual concerns. It contains a useful explanation of the way the CDF actually operates (hint: far more creaking bureaucracy than fearsome inquisition). It is well-researched; Shortt gives the impression of having read Benedict’s writings with some care. And he does try to be objective most of the time. (Hans Küng is quoted a number of times, but Shortt frankly admits that he has a “weakness for self-promotion”.) It is a pity that the book appeared before Summorum Pontificum and the lifting of the decree of excommunication on the four bishops of the Society of St Pius X; it would have been interesting to see how Shortt approached those subjects. (Though he mentions Bishops Fellay’s meeting with Benedict only in passing, and mistakenly says that the SSPX does not recognise the validity of papal conclaves after 1958, he presumably knows more about the Society now.)

He also includes quite a lovely anecdote about Joseph Ratzinger’s ordination to the priesthood. It took place in 1951, at the cathedral in Freising. At the moment the Archbishop laid his hands on him, “a little bird, perhaps a lark, flew up from the high altar in the cathedral and trilled a little joyful song.” Though not a superstitious man, the future Pope could not help seeing it as a good omen;  a sign that he was “on the right way.” Many faithful would no doubt agree.

Wallowing in self-pity

For someone who has supposedly been “silenced” by the mean old men at the Vatican, Fr Tony Flannery certainly does seem to enjoy the limelight a lot. Over the past year, he has spoken at conferences, given press conferences and generally bleated about his plight to anyone who would listen. On 21 January, in what was a week of fawning media attention towards the 65-year old rebel Redemptorist, he was given the space to air his views in the Irish Times.

His article drips with self-pity (“a year of tension, stress and difficult decsion-making in my life”) and with tired generalizations (“the current Vatican trend of creating a church of condemnation rather than one of compassion”). Its language is vague and hackneyed. One pities the poor readers of Reality.

Fr Flannery has a curiously contradictory attitude towards the laity. On the one hand, he seems to hold the basic liberal view that the Church should adjust its teachings to public opinon, or as he puts it, “the reality of people’s lives. This [necessitates] a willingness to listen to the people, to understand their hopes and joys, their struggles and fears.” In the years following Vatican II, “priests and people alike learned a lot how to form their consciences and make mature decisions about all areas of their lives. As priests we learned more from people than they learned from us.” It is unclear what exactly he means by this, other than perhaps that rather he decided that what his hearers own “consciences” told them was just as valid as anything the Church had to say.

However, when it comes to more conservative lay people, Father’s “willingness to listen” suddenly bridles. He may well have much to learn from the right kind of lay people, but heaven help them if they should dare to suggest that a priest should, you know, do the job of a priest. At some point after the carefree days of the sixties, “authority became centralised in the Vatican once again,” “pressure came on priests of my generation to be more explicit and decisive in presenting church teaching” and “we became aware that there were people around the country who reported any slight deviation from the official stance by a priest, for example  allowing a woman to read the Gospel at Mass.”

I was once at a Mass where a young woman read the Gospel. It was a student Mass in Germany. The priest was an old liberal who had got married some years earlier and was thus forbidden to administer the sacraments. He was an ideologue who concealed a bossy rebelliousness behind a mask of benign beardy tolerance. He used to hang open letters in prominent places protesting against the “silencing” of various dissident theologians. When, at this Mass,  a female student nervously read the Gospel, he stood benevolently by, basking in the warm glow of how enlightened and tolerant he was being. It was difficult not to think that asking her to do the reading, he was being deliberately provocative. I have never met Fr Flannery, but I seem to recognise that type in much of what he writes.

When Fr Flannery’s supporters are calling for solidarity for him, they usually compare the Church’s “rigidity” and “intransigence” with the priest’s “tolerance”. Apparently, the Fr Flannerys of this world and their media supporters are all about tolerance, freedom of ideas, freedom of speech, while only archaic institutions like the Catholic Church remain rooted in a mentality which says that all ideas are not equally valid, that some truths must be accepted and some rejected. Numerous correspondents of the broadsheet newspapers have likened Fr Flannery’s ordeal to the Inquisition.

However, secularists can be among the keenest and most ruthless heresy hunters out there. In December 2012, the German Catholic journalist Martin Lohmann was removed from his job at the Macromedia College for Media and Communication in Cologne. The reason was that he had opposed homosexual marriage and abortion in a television discussion. In a statement confirming Lohman’s dismissal, his former employers announced: “The college maintains in its core values a view of people in which different sexual orientations are respected. It rejects every form of discrimination.”

Just compare these two cases for a moment. Fr Flannery has repeatedly claimed not to believe in certain core Catholic doctrines, such as the institution of priesthood and apostolic succession. For this he has been asked not to publish a column in a magazine no one reads (come on, when was the last time you curled up with the latest edition of Reality?) and has been fêted  by an army of media well-wishers . Martin Lohmann, who has simply defended Catholic moral teaching on television, has been fired from his job. Yet Fr Flannery’s supporters give you the impression that conservative Catholics are the only people who ever practice intolerance in this enlightened age; the rest of humanity is apparently free of this vice. That conservative Catholics like Martin Lohmann suffer more for taking a stand than liberals like Fr Flannery does not seem to occur to them. Lohmann’s ordeal has gone largely unnoticed outside the German Catholic media, and what attention it has received elsewhere has been far from sympathetic. An article in the once-conservative Welt newspaper does not bother mentioning the fact that he has lost his job until six paragraphs in.

In spite of all Fr Flannery’s talk about listening to the laity and having so much to learn from everyone, there is a certain narcissism about him. The article in the Irish Times is all about him, his youthful hopes, his difficulties, his stance, his decisions, his freedom of conscience. There is very little sense in it of obedience to God or to his ecclesiastical superiors. It is not the kind of spectacle that would be likely to inspire a young man considering a vocation to the priesthood. “Enter a seminary! You too could one day be a bitter old man sitting around whining about being disempowered to anyone who will listen!”

Mark Shea wrote recently that some of the priests and bishops who failed to act against abusive priests in the United States were guilty of a strange form of clericalism; they were self-obsessed, seeing themselves as actors in a great cosmic drama in which mere laypeople just had minor parts. A similarly self-obsessed attitude, expressed in a different way, seems to be at work in Fr Flannery. He has been fortunate to pick a fight with the Church at a time when the media are furiously searching for sticks with which to beat her. As a result, his sad little story has been given an inordinate amount of attention, attention which he clearly enjoys. The fact is, were Fr Flannery one of those laymen he claims to find so inspiring; were he an angry pensioner sitting in the pub holding forth about what an outdated and unchristian institution the Church is, no one would remotely care what he had to say. But he is a priest, and that office carries a certain authority even in this day and age. It is ironic that Tony Flannery owes his pitiful celebrity to the clericalism he so opposes, or at least to what remains of it.

Careless doctors, careless headline writers

Two eye-catching articles in the Independent today. One article, regarding the report into the death of Savita Halappanavar, asks “Could X case legislation have prevented this young woman dying?” The author hums and haws for 15 paragraphs before concluding: Probably not. The reason is that the main cause of her death was the fact that the gravity of her situation was not appreciated by the doctors treating her, not the state of Irish law. “In a situation where Savita slipped further into danger while doctors apparently never realised, how could legislation possibly have saved her?”

We then get a report on Cardinal Brady’s Ash Wednesday homily, under the headline: “Instead of ‘giving up’ for Lent, give something back, says cardinal.”

So far, so predictable. Back in my primary school days, I remember being told to "do something positive" for Lent rather than give something up, and I’ve heard the same thing many times since then. It’s amazing that there are still people giving things up for Lent at all, what will all these exhortations we’ve been hearing over the years to do something positive instead.

However, in this case, nothing the cardinal is quoted as saying actually suggests that he is asking people to do something positive instead of giving something up. What he appears to be saying is that they should do something positive as well as give stuff up.  Here are his words as quoted in the article:

“People often make resolutions at the beginning of Lent, very often these are decisions to give up something, alcohol, chocolate, even television. Whilst these are worthy sacrifices, they risk being too narrow.

“Lent is also a time for something positive. Why don’t we consider, for example, reading a piece of scripture, to pray more, perhaps join in parish life, commit ourselves to get to know more about the history of salvation, to resolve to think of others before we speak.

“Lent is the interplay of prayer and fasting and alms giving. They are not ends in themselves but means to an end. The goal is to draw closer to God.”

A couple of thoughts on this. First, it is quite clear from the words quoted that the cardinal did not actually suggest that Catholics “give something back” instead of giving something up, but rather that they should do both. He explicitly says that Lent is about fasting as well as prayer. Perhaps the editor had had the “do something positive instead of giving something up” mantra drummed into his head for so many years that he just assumed that this was what Cardinal Brady had meant.

Second: the cardinal’s words about abstaining being “too narrow” was, as the politicians say, unhelpful. The media were easily able to misrepresent his words as meaning that Christians should not abstain from things during Lent, when that was not in fact what he had said.

Third, I do not share His Eminence’s apparent confidence that fasting or abstaining during Lent is so widespread these days. I remember overhearing a conversation in a cantine a few years ago. A Canadian chef was telling someone that he had asked his Irish Catholic wife what the Church’s rules on Lenten fasting were. “She couldn’t give me a clear answer,” he said. Indeed. How many people who were subjected to post-Vatican II catechesis could?

As for my own Lenten observances: I’ve given up meat and alcohol. At least Monday through Saturday; we’ll see if I have the strength to abstain from them on Sundays too. As for the “something positive” part, that has yet to be decided.

Yet more thoughtful and respectful dialogue from the media

There has been predictable rending of garments from the mainstream media following David Cameron’s Europe speech. Having listened to the speech, I can’t see what all the fuss is about; Mr Cameron merely proposed putting the question of Britain’s membership to the British people, while repeatedly – and convincingly – reaffirming his own commitment to staying in. But of course “Europe” is That Which Must Not Be Called Into Question, and so our elites exploded in apoplexy.

The Irish Independent’s editorial tried to reassure its readers that there was nothing to worry about, suggesting that Cameron may have had some tactical reasons for his speech. The paper wrote that “keeping rabid Eurosceptics in his party safe in their kennels is a significant consideration, as is keeping the right-wing UKIP on the political margins where it belongs.”

Rabid? Safe in their kennels? What kind of language is that? And how would our own thin-skinned media class react if a British newspaper wrote about mainstream Irish politicians in such a manner?

You can’t help agreeing with Daniel Hannan  that Europhiles are more driven by hatred of Eurosceptics, or by what they imagine Eurosceptics to be, than by any real love of their fellow Europeans.

Christmas reading: Monsignor Knox

When I was a teenager, the Christmas holidays were a time for reading books. The distractions of the internet and alcohol did not exist, the only television in our house was firmly under the control of my parents, and social life was confined to a few dutiful visits to relatives’ houses. I had plenty of time to myself, and I filled that time by reading. These days, there are far more other demands on one’s time. Still, I was able to get through three books over the holidays this year, three very different books offering varying degrees of pleasure. But they were all interesting, in their way, and worth reading.

I should like to write a brief word about each of them. I do not propose to review them as such, merely to highlight a couple of things that stood out at me while reading. I will begin with The Life of Right Reverend Ronald Knox by Evelyn Waugh. I discovered Knox’s writings during a recent browsing session in the bookshop of the Oxford Oratory. In case you are unfamiliar with him, Knox (1888 – 1957) was the son of an evangelical Church of England bishop, and after a brilliant career at Eton and Oxford, became an Anglican minister and one of the leaders of the Anglo-Catholic movement. He converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1917. After a spell as a master at St Edmund’s, a Catholic school and seminary in Hertfordshire, he served as chaplain to the Catholic students of Oxford from 1926 to 1939. During the Second World War he completed a translation of the Bible into English that is still in use. His literary achievements include apologetic works, sermons, conferences, satirical poems, detective stories and translations, among them the autobiography of St Thérèse of Lisieux.

Many of Waugh’s favourite themes – public schools, Oxford, Catholicism, literature – find a reflection in Monsignor Knox’s life and make him an ideal match for his subject. The book is an absolute pleasure to read.

One thing that strikes you from the book’s very first page is what a superb writer Waugh is. Reading his description of two old photographs of Knox’s grandfathers, and the detail he draws forth from them (“a plump complacent face, clean-shaven save for a wisp of side-whisker; the nose is large, the eyes small, the lips prim with a hint of cruelty; the hair is thin, long and soft; baldness lends a spurious height to the smooth brow”), you are forcefully reminded that he tried to be a visual artist before he ever published a book.

Another thing that strikes you is the character of Knox himself. He had a personality that one can only describe as holy, holy in the true sense of ‘set apart.’ At the age of seventeen, while at Eton, he took a private vow of celibacy; he did not want the affection of others, which he loved and craved, to get in the way of his relationship with God. He prayed a great deal, and at the outset of the Great War in 1914, in which many of his friends were to die, he spent up to six hours a day in prayer. (He himself did not enlist in the army because he was in Anglican holy orders. When, just before his conversion to Catholicism, he decided that he was not truly an ordained priest, he offered to join up but was not accepted.) Much later in his life, a schoolgirl who entered a chapel while he was praying there alone remembered that walking between him and the altar was like cutting through the supernatural.

There is something rather old-worldly about the character of Knox, and this was evident to him in his own time. In his youth, the rivalry between different factions of Christianity in England could be intense. His conversion to Catholicism greatly upset his evangelical father. But when he returned to Oxford as Catholic chaplain, he found that his chief enemy was now not Protestantism but rather a dull, creeping secularism, a general indifference to religion in general. This new world was one with which he had difficulty coming to terms. After he stepped down from his Oxford post in 1939, Knox spent the rest of his life living in large country houses as the guest of wealthy Catholic families. It was only grudgingly that he allowed the Latin phrases in the later editions of his books to be translated into English. Waugh notes that, incredibly for the 21^st century reader, he frowned on the practice of opening letters at the breakfast table, considering it vulgar. He did not see his first “talkie” until 1954.

Waugh is careful not to portray Knox as some kind of superhuman plaster saint. He had his weaknesses, and Waugh mentions them. Knox was what some people today would call a Little Englander; he liked what was English and familiar, and distrusted anything unfamiliar or foreign. This may seem an unfair thing to say about a man who published acclaimed translations from Latin and French. But after he had become a Catholic he had to spend some time in a seminary before being ordained a priest, and there was talk of sending him to Rome, where there was a college, the Beda, which specialised in late vocations. However, Knox was ultimately kept in England, in St Edmund’s. It will surprise some readers that he felt relieved at this decision. When, as an old man, he travelled to Africa to meet Lord and Lady Acton, he took little interest in the sights of the place, a fact not lost on the sharp-eyed author of Waugh in Abyssinia. He was a somewhat delicate man, and protested that he was overworked as chaplain in Oxford, where he had a few dozen undergraduate souls under his care. (Waugh notes that the average parish priest at the time would have had many more people to look after.) The privations of wartime could make him irritable.

But a picture still shines through this book of a truly saintly man, a man who strove to serve God as best he could and with the very particular weapons put at his disposal. Knox was a man of particular tastes and habits; his world was the world of the school, the university and the country house, and in these places he thrived. At Oxford, his door was always open to students, and he was greatly loved by the nuns and schoolgirls to whom he acted as chaplain at Aldenham during the World War II, in addition to his work of translating the Bible. Pope John Paul II was said to have remarked of C.S. Lewis that he well knew what his apostolate was. Knox, too, knew what his apostolate was, and he pursued it. He was not called to preach the Gospel in far-off heathen lands (as his grandfather, a Protestant missionary in Asia, had been); he was not called to practice heroic poverty or martyrdom, or to profound mystical experiences (although he did apparently have a mystical experience at his Catholic confirmation). He was called to discover and then to defend the faith; and whether he defended it against Protestantism or secularism or everyday human weaknesses, he always did so in a wise, frank, coherent and often humorous manner. That is why his writings are still read today, why they still retain the ring of truth, and why Waugh’s biography is a worthy addition to the shelf of anyone interested in Catholic history or apologetics.

The O-word

Dr Rhona Mahony of the National Maternity Hospital doesn’t like the suggestion that unfounded threats of suicide could be used to have children aborted if the law allowed abortion where suicide was threatened. According to the Independent, she told the Oireachtas Health Committee:

"As a woman, I'm offended by some of the pejorative and judgmental views that women will manipulate doctors in order to obtain termination of pregnancy on the basis of fabricated ideas of suicide ideation or intent," Dr Mahony said.

There it is, the O-word again. The painless alternative to rational argument. When confronted by a question you don’t like, just accuse the other person of “offending” you. It immediately deflects the critical glares from you to him.

Meanwhile, Ed West has a mildly tongue-in-cheek post about “gingerphobia.” If red hair is regarded as an unattractive trait, and unattractive people are unconsciously discriminated against in the workplace (as they are), then surely redheads should be given special status and gingerphobia should join our society's long list of thought crimes. "Then, finally," says Ed, "I can win the most precious weapon in today's political debate - the trusty shield of victimhood."

I don't say that Dr Mahony is herself claiming to be a victim. But that "trusty shield of victimhood" is the reason you hear the O-word so often these days. People have an unconscious sense that if they use it often enough, it will eventually undermine any criticism of their position.

More jewels from the mainstream media

The idea that Britain may actually leave the EU is starting to alarm our politicians:

Ireland, which holds the presidency of the European Union for the next six months, urged Britain not be too adversarial in pushing for change in its relationship with the EU on Tuesday, saying it should remember its close history in Europe.

Well, of course they would say that. If our biggest trading partner left the EU, it might increasingly make sense for Ireland to leave too. And that ... that’s just out of the question, isn’t it? Lucinda Creighton thinks so:

"We're a neighbour and we're a friend of the UK. We have a deep interest in ensuring that the UK stays engaged," said Creighton.

Not we, Ms Creighton. You. You and the rest of the europhile political class who are going to be left looking extremely foolish when what you have been pushing as unquestionable dogma for forty years is shown up for the hollow nonsense that it is.

But asked about British voters' increasingly uneasy feelings about the EU and the possibility of a referendum on EU ties being held in the coming years, she added: "We would respect whatever decision the British people make."

Well, that’s good to know. After all, our rulers have an excellent track record when it comes to respecting the people’s decisions in EU referendums. Absolutely spotless.

Meanwhile, over on the continent, a priest is being ridiculed for posting photographs of people who are leaving the Church in the church hall, in the hope that someone who knows them might try to persuade them to stay. We are helpfully told why Catholics might be lapsing:

Many Catholics in the liberal Netherlands were shocked by Pope Benedict XVI's Christmas call to "fight" gay marriage, which the Netherlands was the first country to legalise in 2001.

What? Pope Benedict opposed to gay marriage? Whoever could have thought it? I’m,  I’m ... shocked!

Around 28 percent of people in the Netherlands say they are Roman Catholic, 18 percent Protestant and 44 percent say they have no religion.

28 plus 18 plus 44 equals 90. I wonder who the remaining 10% could possibly be ... And I wonder why the article does not mention them. Maybe it’s because they could upset the lovely Bigoted Church Vs the Rest of Enlightened Humanity narrative that the article has been busily spinning.