Churches of Verona: Art Galleries for God

I have traveled more on Italian railways in a week than I traveled on British railways in the previous seven years. The quality of accommodation varies hugely. I boarded the train for Como clutching my second class ticket and settled into what looked like a dusty and unappealing second class compartment. When the ticket inspector toured the train, he politely redirected me from my padded first class seat into second class where I spent the rest of the trip to Como on a wooden bench. The last time I traveled on wooden seats was on the bus in Dubrovnik in 1996 - and that was a year after the end of the civil war when Dubrovnik had been badly damaged.

Mercifully the other trains have provided padding under my bottom. The trains on the main Milan-Venice line are as comfortable as those on the German and British systems. The only significant difference between first and second class was that found on British trains: second class has four abreast seats, first class is three abreast. The train going up to Stresa on Lake Maggiore had the extra appeal of double decker carriages, with a great view over the beautiful countryside from the upper deck. And they are much cheaper than British trains. The round trip from Milan to Verona cost less than 20 euros for over three hours of very comfortable transport.

(VERONA MAP: Click on map for larger view). The trips out of Milan showed me some of the glories of the Italian lakes and mountains, plus an unforgettable day in Verona. I knew practically nothing about this ancient city, which increased my pleasure at sights such as the restored Roman amphitheater, the cathedral, the church of St Anastasia and Juliet's House. Yes, that would be the Juliet whose tragic romance with Romeo provides a permanent bonus for the Verona tourist trade. The old Capulet house with the famous balcony was crowded with young people. The walls either side of the entrance to the courtyard were covered with heart drawings and signatures of young lovers. I did not cross the river to the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes, whose hilltop site provides a wonderful panoramic view of the city. As with Hong Kong and Singapore, it was a pleasure to be out on the brightly lit city streets on a Saturday evening. It had a vibrant, but safe and civilized atmosphere as people relaxed in the numerous restaurants and watering holes.

You could not say as much about parts of Milan itself. Railway stations in any big city tend to have a bad reputation and unfortunately in the case of Milan's splendid Art Deco structure it is fully justified. The huge piazza on the west side is a very fine public space, with the elegant Pirelli tower dominating one corner. Regrettably it is a magnet for drunks, hustlers and beggars galore. My hotel was only five minutes walk from the station, which meant I walked through this unpleasant zone far more often than I would have chosen; I used Milan's excellent Metro system repeatedly and inevitably came out of the subway exit in this piazza. It was not just the station area; beggars lurked everywhere in the city and were shameless in their soliciting, especially around church entrances.

The Naviglio area beside one of Milan's surviving canals is far more appealing to walk around. A serious deficiency in Milan is the lack of any substantial waterfront, The Thames in London, the Vltava in Prague, the Danube in Vienna and Budapest, the Seine in Paris, the lakes in Chicago and Toronto, all add hugely to the pleasure of life in those cities, as well as defining city areas. The shallow remnants of the Milan canals are still picturesque, but no substitute for serious waterways.

As with Milan's "lesser" churches, any church or cathedral I entered in Verona or other smaller towns was a art gallery for God. It is difficult and expensive enough maintaining the far less ornate British churches; how long the Italians can continue to preserve all these elderly buildings and their incredible splendor is open to question. St Anastasia, to name only one, had scaffolding all over the interior and I could inspect only part of its sculptures, murals and paintings.

Even the secular art galleries in Italy often look like a Catholic propaganda show. As I toured the Pinacotera di Brera, one of the top galleries in Italy, I passed a group of Japanese tourists surrounding Caravaggio's "Supper at Emmaus". Their guide was explaining this superlative masterpiece to them and I could not help wondering how she was commenting on it. You obviously cannot analyze such works purely on the basis of colour, composition, use of light, pigmentation and brushwork; the spiritual inspiration behind each explodes out of the frame, even with an artist such as Caravaggio who lead a highly, er, irregular life and used street people as his models for religious subjects. The majority of the pictures in the Brera were effectively sermons in light; the contrast between the religious imagery and the modern works which the Brera also saw fit to display was embarrassing. How could any curator think of placing such primitive creations under the same roof as Tintoretto, Mantegna or Raphael?

Living in a post-Christian country with a long Protestant history, it was strange to walk the streets of an almost totally Catholic country. The only non-Catholic structure I saw was the Jewish area of the extraordinary Cimitero Monumentale. Most of this cemetery had row after row of lavish Catholic family tombs, some almost mini-churches in their scale and ornamentation. There is a synagogue on the city map but I did not see it. I did not see a single non-Catholic church anywhere, though they do exist here and there.

Finding the Time

Milan, 6th March 2008

Most of the cliches about Italian style are true. The shopping mall in the Cathedral Square would put most cathedrals in other countries to shame, with its vaulted glazed roof, sculptures and paintings. Admittedly it is the short cut between the third-biggest Cathedral in the world and the square which has La Scala opera house on the other side and the statue of Leonardo da Vinci in the middle. The local police drive Alfa Romeos. The local Ferrari shop will sell you a $5,000 model Ferrari. The shops are stuffed with designer labels, Italian, French and American. Most of the "minor" local churches would be major tourist attractions in any other country on earth. The Cathedral itself would reward weeks of close examination. It is studded with 3,500 statues, large and small. Three large windows behind the high altar have 390 panes between them - never mind all the other windows around the other wals.

But can you find a cheap watch? You would stand a better chance of finding a duck-billed platypus roaming these historic streets. It all started on Sunday morning when I pulled into long-term parking at Gatwick Airport. There was a sudden clunk and my wrist watch had slid into the gap beside the handbrake. The bracelet had snapped and, the insane economics of mass production being as they are, it makes more sense to buy a whole new watch. It is irritating out of all proportion carrying the watch in my pocket, but cheap watches seem to be unobtainable round here.

So far I have seem the Cathedral, several "lesser" churches such as St Ambrose (the citys patron saint), the Pirrelli building, the incredible Art Deco rail station (here
..and the Science and Technology Museum (where Leonardo gets frequent mention of course, playing the same role as Beethoven in Bonn or Shakespeare in Stratford-on Avon). I have been up to Lake Como and had a boat ride up and down the lake, surrounded by wonderful hills and mountains. The town of Como is a blot on its lovely landscape, but the cathedral is again absolutely magnificent. I took the boat ride to the little town of Colico at the north end of the lake. My guidebook had absolutely nothing to say about Colico and the local tourist office was closed, as I was so early in the season. But a poster on the door pointed me to the local military fortress.

Being Italy, even the gun turrets looked stylish. I thought the whole set up looked suspiciously Teutonic and suspected a WW2 German relic. But in fact it was a wholly Italian creation from 1914. It guards the pass coming south from Austria. Politics change, but geography does not; there is a 12th century castle ruin less than 200 yards from the "modern" fortress with its four 5.8 inch Schneider guns. (Despite the name, Schneider is French. Like Krupps in Germany and Vickers in England, they are the long-time national armaments suplliers). It is still an active military site, surrounded by barbed wire. Italy and Austria are at peace, but you never know......Even these old guns could provide a lethal welcome for any unwelcome visitors from the north.

Italy is always full of surprises and contradictions. The military base at Colico is named in memory of both a WW2 partisan AND a WW2 fascist. Is this dual tribute unique anywhere in the world? One of the subway stations on the Milan metro is named "Moscow" - which could only reflect the influence of the very strong Italian Communist Party. But less than 100 yards from St Ambrose there is a memorial to the men of an Italian division who died on the Russian front between 1941 and 1943.

Inviting Parents to Walk on Water

Economic freedom is great. Everyone is free to dine at the Ritz. Or buy a Rolls-Royce. Or go to the school of their parents' choosing.

My friends in the church music group have children at secondary (high) school or approaching that age, so the merits and defects of local schools are never far from their minds or words. One of the families is an exemplar of British middle class strategies for working the education system. They moved from Reading into the neighbouring school district of Wokingham, which has some of the best state schools in the country.

Wokingham's Maiden Erlegh School has achieved the highest honours that any British school can aspire to; local real estate agents advertise houses as being "in the Maiden Erlegh catchment area" and it has inflated house prices in its area. Thus it has a double appeal to the middle classes obsessed with schooling and house prices. Unfortunately, it is so successful that many of the teachers cannot afford to live in the catchment area of their own school.

But Wokingham offers a real choice to its parents and so my friends' daughter goes to the very highly regarded all-girls Holt School. Sadly, the all-boys Forest School is not held in quite the same esteem, so they are preparing to bite the fee paying bullet and send their son to Blue Coat School or the Salesians in Farnborough, 20 miles to the south. There is the Oratory School at Woodcote, only 8 miles to the north. The Oratory has huge prestige, dating back to its association with John Cardinal Newman. But it has equally huge fees, double those of the Salesians.

What if you want a Catholic education and cannot afford the fees for the Salesians (boys) or St Joseph's Convent School (girls)? Well, I'm afraid you have a horrible moral quandary. On the west side of Reading there is the mainly-state-funded Blessed Hugh Faringdon School, named in memory of the last abbot of Reading Abbey, decapitated under Henry 8th. But BHF could never be accused of inflating local house prices. It is not quite one of those local schools where, as I said earlier, middle class parents would rather eat their own livers than send their children. But its exam performance is, er, average or slightly worse and it has had a run of bad local media publicity. There is plainly a rough element among the male pupils and there have been incidents of threatened mass brawls with pupils at Prospect College, another dodgy local school. Worse still, there was a series of regular fist fights in a local road between BHF pupils with an audience of dozens of other BHF pupils.

So it is hardly surprising that many Catholic parents vote with the limited choice they are allowed by the Local Education Authority and send their children to the very good Little Heath School. Another of the music group parents sends his two older girls to BHF and puts a brave face on it, saying it is a good school. But his very bright older daughter has plainly lost out by going to BHF rather than to a seriously academic school where she would be properly stretched. A maths lesson was typical of what bright pupils have to endure within the "comprehensive" state system, Catholic or otherwise. She had quickly finished her 20 questions and was told not to go ahead while her luckless teacher helped those pupils still struggling with questions 9 or 11.......

I felt extra unhappy in view of reports from a teacher at BHF about the bureaucracy in a not particularly large school. It has a head teacher (Principal), a deputy head and FOUR assistant heads. What on earth do these four assistants do? In my schooldays, even big schools managed fine with a Head and a Deputy Head. These "Assistants" do not have responsibilty for particular subjects; there are separate subject Heads - Head of English, Head of Maths, etc. On top of that, there are separate Heads of Year - Year 7 (11/12 year old), Year 8 (12/13 year old), etc. The only activity that my friend could think these "Assistants" performed was driving BMWs with personalised number plates. Like the National Health Service doctors portrayed in the ludicrous Michael Moore's "Sicko", it is the service providers, not the luckless customers, who benefit from State services.

Well, what alternative do faithful Catholics have? There is always choice for the heroic, like the father I mentioned who cleaned toilets at midnight to send his daughter to a private school. But it is obviously grossly unjust that people should be forced to make such choices. Do you work a third or fourth job to pay the fees for your other children? If every local Catholic parent had real freedom of choice, BHF would almost certainly collapse in a week as parents sent their children to really desirable schools, secular or religious. You feel that the current unhappy compromises might be worthwhile if Catholic schools played a successful role in handing on the faith. But the statistics are grim; estimates of lapsation rates vary from 85 to 95%. You might as well choose the best secular school available.

It is not just that the quality of religious instruction at Catholic schools has been questioned repeatedly and searchingly over the past 35 years. The best school can do only so much without parental support. I went to a Christmas concert at a local highly regarded Catholic primary (elementary) school in 2001. A friend was carless for a day and needed a ride for him and his little girl, who was performing in the concert. The concert was wonderfully organized and there was hardly a dry eye in the school hall as the host of angelic 6 year olds sang "Away in a manger". Then the head teacher stood up at the end, thanked every one graciously, and urged parents to take their children to Mass at least once over the Christmas period. Talk about a let down....At one time it would have been taken for granted that almost all parents of children in a Catholic school would have taken their children to Mass every Sunday, not just (maybe) at Christmas, plus the occasional hatch, match and dispatch. Now we had an excellent head teacher proclaiming publicly to the little children that the vast majority of parents were non-practising.

Other factors obviously weigh heavily. A Vatican document noted one subversive difficulty some years ago when discussing the selection, formation and education of the new generation of young priests. How wholeheartedly will any eager young priest catechise his flock on true Catholic morality when his parents were divorced, or his younger sister is cohabiting with her boyfriend, or his older brother is shacked up with his boyfriend? This obvious inhibition similarly afflicts Catholic secular teachers of religious instruction. Even if the teacher is personally comfortable with Catholic teaching, how can he/she extoll the sanctity of life-long marriage when up to a third of the pupils have divorced or separated parents, with one or both parents further involved in second families?

British Catholic parents face a lose-lose-lose situation, whereas most British parents face only a lose situation. You pay part of the cost of state funded Catholic schools (through a levy on parish funds to which you pay from already taxed income) as well as paying for lousy secular State schools. AND your kids will probably lapse anyway.

Even making the huge financial sacrifice to send your daughter to the most traditional "Catholic" private school in town, St Joseph's Convent School, might not be all you perceive. According to some reports the intake at St Jo's is nearly 50% Muslim. The local immigrant population understandably gag at the prospect of their daughters going to some of the appalling State schools with their thuggish male students, who fully follow the advice of one exceptionally vile British Government minister of the 1960s: "The permissive society is the civilized society". St Jo's is very conveniently only a short walk from the heavily Muslim area of East Reading, with its Islamic dress shop, halal food shops and the site for the second new Mosque in town. It is only 300 yards from the existing mosque, in a converted and extended house. And, to judge from its ceaseless advertising, St Jo's is an educational business like any other which needs paying customers to survive. It plainly cannot survive on the patronage of 100% committed Catholic families alone. But how "Catholic" is it going to be eventually? You have a son???? Well, you're totally out of luck as regards Catholic private education in town - see Salesians and Oratory above.....

Britain in recent years has moved much closer to the American legal culture where you can sue anyone for anything. So far I have not heard of anyone suing their Local Education Authority for forcing their child to go to a substandard school. But the day cannot be far off. The law says that you have to provide a suitable education for your child up to age 16. This could be private or home schooling, but for the majority it plainly means going to a school provided by the Local Education Authority. And so many LEA schools are officially recognised as substandard that tens of thousands of children are forced to start at such schools every September. This is such a monstrous outrage that I am surprised it seems to have excited so little public anger, apart from the annual grumblings and protests in the local media from parents whose children lost out on a coveted place.

An obvious way out would be a voucher system, where every parent got a voucher for each child to the value of the state expenditure per pupil, to be spent on the school of their choice. I am reminded of the satirical TV show around 1968, where the jester explained that, in view of the soaring defence bill, the Government was going to give everyone £30 and tell them to defend themselves. Obviously all the current entrenched interests (e.g. teachers' unions) would be totally opposed to such a move, as would much of the British commentariat, many of whom rival the above Government Minister in their moral depravity.

The numerous objections to vouchers deserve serious thought. It might discourage efficiency, as every school would get £x per pupil and would feel entitled to spend up to that limit. It would involve extra expenditure if parents were allowed to offset vouchers against their existing private school fees. It would encroach on the independence of many existing private schools as they became partially dependent on state funding. Given the unsavoury nature of so many of our politicians, I would not trust them to run a burger stall, much less have any influence over the lives of children. Also it might entrench cultural divides as parents sent their children to Muslim/Sikh/Hindu schools on top of the existing Anglican, Catholic and Jewish schools which already receive State funding. In the short term there would likely be extensive disruption as the worst schools closed and new ones sprung up like mushrooms.

But it could be a prodigiously liberating move for most parents and pupils. It would create a much wider educational market. Just about every consumer good we enjoy at present (tea, coffee, cars, TVs) was once a rare luxury available only to a tiny fraction of the population. The TV sets at the start of the BBC TV service in 1936 had seven inch screens and cost £70, i.e. six months pay for a London bus driver - about the same fraction of his pay as private school fees would cost a bus driver today if he wanted to send only one child to a private school. Plainly a similar consumer revolution is long overdue in provision of public goods as has happened for "exotic" foods like tea and coffee. One observer noted that Britain is well provided with BMW/Mercedes class private schools. What we need is far more Toyota/Honda class schools within reach of the hard-working majority. (The car reliability surveys are nearly always topped by two manufacturers and it ain't BMW or Mercedes).

Sweden has made one of the first serious moves in providing education vouchers in the 1990s and, as a result, a whole new market in education provision has exploded in a country which previously had very few private schools. The size of some of these new Swedish private high schools is surprisingly small by British or US standards - around 180 pupils. The furnishings and equipment are Spartan, but you do not need fancy equipment for an effective education - just dedicated teachers, committed parents and hard working students. This system has been so successful so quickly in Sweden that it may become official Conservative Party policy soon. But I would be amazed to see its actual nationwide implementation in less than 10 to 20 years.

The possibilities in a liberated education market could be extraordinary for Catholic parents. It would suddenly be possible to have small, but genuinely Catholic schools with a committed parental backing for committed Catholic teachers. Even if the voucher rules prohibited "top up" fee contributions directly from parents, there would be countless other ways to gain money; business sponsorship, fund raising, National Lottery grants, educational trust grants, parish support and much more. The outstanding Maiden Erlegh school mentioned above invites parents to join in work parties at the school, doing repairs, redecoration and so on. This frees up resources to spend on books, laboratory equipment, etc. In effect they are soliciting fee paying, in kind rather than cash, within a state school; a small Catholic community school would probably do even better. Other local schools at present obviously don't even try the Maiden Erlegh approach - they would probably have a better response if they invited parents to walk on water.

Chuch of England

Dear Stan,

After all my adverse comments on the Church of England, here is a very illuminating piece seeing the religious divide and the very survival of the CoE from an Anglican perspective. It is so long that I do not know if you wish to post it complete, though it contains more thoughts on the "Sharia Law" debate which has world-wide implications. This idea has already been tested in Ontario, just over the border from you.

Edmund Campion, whom he mentions, was a very local "English Martyr" who ran an underground Catholic press at Stonor House, about 12 miles north-east of my house. Stonor House has been the home of the same Catholic family for over 800 years. I visited it a few years ago. Part of the James Bond film "The Living Daylights" was shot there. If you check out the DVD, you see it when Timothy Dalton drives up to the "country HQ" of MI6. I asked one of the staff about the film crew visit and the reaction was "Never Again!!!" Although all British stately homes are desperate for cash, Stonor felt they could survive without the hassle of another blockbuster taking over the premises. But then a recent Stonor heir was chairman of Barclays Bank, so he happily had the loot to keep Stonor in good repair.


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Is the Church of England finished? Should it be?
Peter Hitchens

I love the Church of England. By that I do not mean its bishops, its arid modern prayers and poetry-free, unmemorable modern bibles, nor its stripped and carpeted modernised churches, its compulsory handshakes, perky modern hymns or happy-clappy conventicles where everyone is saved. If I'm saved it was such a narrow squeak that I think it wiser not to go on about it, as the man said.

What I love is the wondrous Elizabethan settlement which refused to make windows into men's souls and allowed Catholics and Protestants to forget their differences in a rather beautiful ambiguity.

That settlement is expressed in several ways. It lingers in buildings, in books, in music, a sort of ghostly presence just within reach at certain times of day and in a few unravaged, unwrecked parts of this country. It also continues to survive as a body of thought, song and literature, quite immune from the peculiar bureaucratic organisation which currently uses the Church's name.

It is still often to be found in churches and cathedrals which - though sadly stripped of much loveliness - managed to retain and guard far more of their pre-Reformation mystery and art than in any other Protestant country.

It is to be found in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, itself quarried from Coverdale's Bible and from the later Authorised Version, written in the Golden Age of the English language by people who understood poetry, cadence, music and memory - and who were concerned to keep what they could of a much older heritage.

I don't expect to carry Roman Catholics with me here, as they have long ago constructed a myth about the Church of England which is, like all good myths, rooted in truth but yet not entirely true. The torture and judicial murder of Roman Catholic martyrs such as Edmund Campion remain as a gory stain on Elizabeth and on the Anglican tradition. But Campion (as Evelyn Waugh's fine biography makes clear) sought his martyrdom and refused all opportunities to evade it.

Thomas More and John Fisher were martyred by Henry VIII, not really over doctrine but over the King's desire to have his first marriage annulled, something which might easily have been done by the Roman Catholic Church under slightly different political circumstances. More and Fisher, now recognised as men of courage and integrity, perjured and judicially murdered, appear on the most recent Anglican Calendar of Saints.
And that is in spite of the fact that More himself was no mean persecutor of Protestants, sending several followers of Luther to die in the flames (for Henry VIII killed anyone who got in his way, Catholic or Protestant). He was not, perhaps, the near-perfect man portrayed in that matchless film 'A Man for All Seasons', but his courage - like that of his opponents - is amazing to us.

I may be wrong, but I do not think that Thomas Cranmer is to be found on any such Roman Catholic calendar. Like many Anglicans, I've attended Roman Catholic churches and cathedrals for Mass (in which I don't take Communion because I think that I'm not entitled to do so, my beliefs being insufficiently clear on the subject, and also because I suspect that by doing so I might upset Roman Catholics) and for Vespers. But I have seldom found a Roman Catholic who knew much about Anglicanism or its services.
I also tend to think that the Roman Catholic concentration upon the English Martyrs ( the murals in the Brompton Oratory and St Aloysius in Oxford are particularly striking examples of this) are a bit of a propagandist 'you did it too' response to the rather larger persecution of Protestants by Mary.

And most of those who feature in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, the roll call of Mary's Protestant victims, were obscure and powerless people, not garlanded academics like Campion or great men like More and Fisher, but even so caught up in a great battle and compelled by circumstances to be heroic when they never meant to be.

The Ayatollah of Canterbury & Sharia Law

Dear Stan,

The great title is stolen from Peter Hitchens' "Mail on Sunday" article on the Archbishop of Canterbury (See below). You would not believe the uproar that his speech on Sharia Law has created in this country. Roger Bolton commented that he could not recall any religious leader being submitted to such vociferous criticism. And Roger has been covering religious news in Britain for over 40 years. Even the secularists have been using the Archbishop's speech as a rod to beat him by suggesting that he was looking to reserve legal privileges for the Anglican Church in line with the Muslims.

The main "Party Line" taken by nearly all commentators has been that there must be one secular law applying to everyone in the country - any religious tribunal's decisions would be merely ancillary and subordinate to the secular judiciary's authority. The British commentariat's "Party Line" has been so unanimous that it made Stalin's Politburo look like an anarchist commune in comparison.

Of course, this Party Line, like just about all Party Lines, is utter bunkum. Whatever "single secular law" applies in theory, the application at street level is anything but consistent or impartial. It has long been notorious that Muslim parents can flout the law on school attendance with impunity, especially when it comes to keeping adolescent girls at home. And as Peter Hitchens points out, the British Government is effectively breaking the law on bigamy by allowing social security payments to multiple Muslim wives.

But this is yet another consequence of the "humane" social security system set up in the 1940s. As I described in an earlier post, the idealists who set it up did not intend to undermine marriage and subsidize illegitimacy and adultery. As George Orwell commented in "The Road to Wigan Pier", the man who drinks a bottle of whiskey a day does not actually intend to get cirrhosis of the liver........

I should point out that Peter Hitchens is an observant Anglican, one of the few writing anywhere in the British media. We Papists have more visible secular media mouths that the Anglicans.

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09 February 2008

At least the Ayatollah of Canterbury is honest, Mr Brown
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The poor old Ayatollah of Canterbury doesn't actually deserve all the slime now being tipped over his modernised mitre. Just some of it. Of course it is absurd for the chief of the Christian Church in this country to cringe publicly to Islam. But at least Archbishop Williams is open about his unwillingness to defend the faith – as is his colleague, the wretched Bishop of Oxford, who recently announced that he was perfectly happy for loudspeakers to blare the Muslim call to prayer across that city.

Even on their own liberal terms, this pair are clueless about sharia and its scorn for women. It was exiled Iranian Muslim women who defeated a similar proposal in Canada. They had travelled thousands of miles to escape sharia law and didn't want it in Toronto, thanks very much. Compare that with the Government, which poses stern-faced as the foe of "terror" and noisily jails figures of fun such as Abu Hamza while greasily pretending that there's no connection between Islam and terrorism.

Gordon Brown's Cabinet has also quietly agreed that Muslim men with more than one wife can now claim benefits for these extra spouses – while bigamy remains a criminal offence for everyone else, punishable by up to seven years in prison.
A
nd what about the discreet little Whitehall celebrations of the Muslim festival of Eid, attended by highly placed civil servants?

Or the incessant multi-faith propaganda in supposedly Christian State schools, where children known to me have been pestered to draw pictures of mosques but are given virtually no instruction in the faith and scripture of our own established Church?

Why is it that in Britain, alone of all countries in the world, the most exalted, educated and privileged have all lost the will to defend their own home? Most of us liked it the way it was before they began to "modernise" it.

I know of nowhere else where those most richly rewarded by a free society are so anxious to trash the place that gave them birth and liberty.

Forgiveness

It is not often that you are in the same room as a terrorist killer and the daughter of one of his victims. It is even rarer that you hear them describing each other as friends. Yet this happened in Room 109 of the Palmer Building at Reading University. The daughter was Jo Tufnell, nee Berry, whose father Sir Antony Berry was murdered in an IRA bombing in 1984. The IRA member who placed the bomb was Patrick McGee.

The bomb which killed Jo's father and four other people was a small terrorist outrage by world standards. Far more people are killed by suicide bombers on a regular basis in Iraq. But this bombing in October 1984 was not just any ordinary IRA coup. It was one of the most ambitious terrorist attacks ever before 9/11. It was intended to wipe out the entire British Government. When the Conservative Party, headed by Margaret Thatcher, met in the south coast resort of Brighton for their annual conference, their living accommodation was thoroughly examined in advance by anti-terrorist specialists. The "Troubles" in Northern Ireland had been in top gear for many years already, with numerous explosions on the UK mainland as well. But McGee, the IRA's long time Chief Explosives Officer, had planted a well concealed time bomb in a bathroom wall in the imposing Grand Hotel, overlooking Brighton's seafront, four weeks before the conference. So when the bomb went off Mrs Thatcher and several other senior Government ministers had an incredibly narrow escape.

I was on a long computer course at Brighton College at that time. Normally I stayed at a small hotel on the west side of the town centre. As one of the top seaside resorts in Britain, Brighton usually has a huge choice of affordable accommodation. But that week there was not a room to be had in Brighton for anyone except the Party delegates and the army of media hangers-on. So I ended up in a very good B + B in the smaller seaside resort of Worthing, 10 miles to the west. I drove past the Grand Hotel each morning and evening on my trips to and from the College on the east side of town.

On Friday morning, I packed the car and was about to leave the B + B when I could hear the unbelievable reports coming from the kitchen radio. Driving up to Brighton, I listened to the local BBC Radio Sussex presenter struggling to juggle ten sensational reports simultaneously. Nothing this big had happened in Brighton since they were fortifying the coast against German invasion in 1940. Yet this 1984 foe was an enemy which no amount of conventional weaponry could defeat. The police were stopping cars coming out of town - several weeks too late.

Brighton was in utter chaos, as the Grand Hotel bombing meant that the very busy coast road was closed and all traffic diverted onto inland roads. After an hour struggling through traffic jams, I finally made it to College. The local paper's lunchtime edition, compiled, to judge from the bylines, by every single member of staff, had a full-front page picture of the fine facade of the Grand with a huge crack from top to bottom. They later won a press award for that front page, proving it is an ill wind that blows no good.

The Grand was rebuilt and reopened, security precautions at major political events became ever more paranoid and everyone moved on with their lives, including the bereaved and the survivors, some permanently disabled. The IRA crowed, vis-a-vis Mrs Thatcher's lucky escape: "We have to be lucky only once. You have to be lucky all the time". And now, more than 23 years later, I found myself in the same room as the perpetrator, a thoughtful softly spoken man in late middle age using a walking stick. He could have been a lecturer in English literature at Reading. He's fully qualified for the job, with a PhD in "Troubles Literature" earned during his many years in prison after being convicted of the Brighton bombing.

The small audience, perhaps 100 people, surprised me. I had turned up at this relatively small lecture theatre without advance booking, expecting to be turned away because people were standing on the ceiling. But that bombing is so long ago for most people. Getting on for half the population is too young to remember Brighton and nearly all the students at Reading were born after 1984. But many of them still showed up, appreciating the relevance to present day conflicts.

Obviously for those closely affected it is always October 1984. Jo Berry struggled with her grief while raising her family and continues to grieve to this day. In 1999, in a day out with her children, she had suddenly been consumed by rage and fury at her father's death, all the emotions of 1984 flooding back. She almost crashed the car driving home that evening. She had been hugely helped by a reconcilation group in Ireland. In return she has worked to help others. Jo works with numerous reconciliation groups around the world in places such as Rwanda and Palestine. She is working with a man in Rwanda who lost 35 members of his family, including his mother, in the ethnic massacres of the 1990s. He is about to meet one of the men who murdered his family.

12th February, the day she spoke at Reading University, was her father's birthday. She had visited his grave to lay flowers and spend time with him. She wondered whether to come to speak that evening. I am sure everyone was glad that she had made the sacrifice to come and share her deepest feelings thoughts with us. It was an extraordinarily difficult and tense evening as everyone could sense her emotions and the effort it had taken both her and Patrick to come to their present position as friends. Patrick said that he would never make the first move towards meeting any of the victims of his bombings as this might only exacerbate the suffering of people who did not feel able to face him. It was Jo who had made the move towards meeting him in 2000.

They are still progressing in their relationship; there could never be anything glib or easy about "forgiveness" in such circumstances. They are still widely separated in some attitudes, as she is a staunch pacifist and he accepts the necessity for armed struggle in some instances. The question and answer session was at least as long as their introductory talks. The audience was willing to ask some very searching questions, such as whether the rest of Jo's family shared her approach to forgiving the killer. Her answer was guarded; as far as I understood it, they did not, but respected her integrity. She said she was anxious not to hurt her family more than they had already been injured. One questioner asked Patrick how he came to the point where he was able to take human life and then move back from that point. Patrick said that much of it was down to the paramilitary training, just as regular armies have to desensitise soldiers to killing. A young American student at Reading asked Jo about 9/11 and the "War on Terror". Jo described the work of "Not in our name", the US group of 9/11 victims opposed to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The meeting was organised and sponsored by the small but invaluable Reading University Chaplaincy team as part of a "Forgiveness Fortnight" during Lent. One of the questioners asked Jo about her religious motivation for forgiveness. She was again cagey about discussing her position, saying she was a spiritual person, but believed in human beings and their potential to change. When a woman referred to someone showing "Christian forgiveness", Jo preferred to describe it as human forgiveness.

It is always awkward questioning the bereaved and the pacifist; when the person under interrogation is both, punches tend to be pulled. The logical consequence of unconditional pacifism is that any thug can take over government unopposed. As George Orwell pointed out in WW2 Britain, there was an overlap between the British fascists and the Peace Pledge Union. Of course - both opposed resistance to Hitler and Mussolini...... And people who are dogmatically opposed to violence tend to be far more intolerant than those who believe it is occasionally necessary. So oddly, I find myself much closer to Patrick than Jo. But there is no questioning her dogged devotion and the good fruits it has produced for at least some individuals.

God is Dead? or...

The graffitto on the London wall declared: "God is dead - Nietzsche".

A different hand below added: "Nietzsche is dead - God".

Most of the movies I have seen in the last twenty years take the Nietzsche line, usually implicitly rather than by direct quotation. Michael Medved, in "Hollywood versus America", noted how unrealistic are most Hollywood movies in omitting the importance of religion to most Americans of all classes. Even when movie characters face desperate crises, such as terminal illness, recourse to religious support is the exception rather than the rule.

Hollywood is not the only offender. Any number of highly praised European films support the total separation of Church and Studio, as one wag described it. In " L'Enfant" ("The Child"), a superbly acted but deeply depressing Belgian feature, you would never guess that Belgium is allegedly 80% Catholic. The young unmarried couple have just produced a child in the post-industrial city of Liege in the east of Belgium. Admittedly, to someone used to the underclass areas of Reading, even downtown Liege looks reasonably attractive, which somewhat weakened this viewer's sympathy with the underclass Belgian pair. Plus, in the best Hollywood tradition, the desperate unmarried mother is so damn hot - in contrast to the chain-smoking sluttish young things wheeling their babies around Reading. But Liege might as well be in Stalin's Russia for all the visibility of the Church. When it comes to naming the baby, the mother reminds the infantile "father" that they have to go to the town hall to have him legally "recognised". There is not even a hint of having her cherished child baptised. The "father" denies that he is the biological parent and even sells his child at one point. The total practical atheism of all the characters' world views makes the experience even more gruelling than the raw material suggests. The same directors' equally harsh and equally praised "Rosetta", also set in Liege, had not a religious bone in its body.

I have just seen "Control" at Reading Film Theatre and it has to be the bleakest and grimmest view of a post-Christian Britain that you are ever likely to see. It makes Michael Caine's "Get Carter", also set in a hard-bitten Northern city, look like a bundle of laughs. It reminded me of Sartre's dictum that "Hell is other people". Well, probably people like this. It follows the short, sad and wasted life of Ian Curtis, lead singer of the punk group Joy Division. The very name of this group is about as crude, offensive and transgressive as you could imagine; it refers to the brothel inmates inside the SS concentration camps. I knew nothing and cared less about Joy Division and Ian Curtis and their music before I saw the film.

I still have no desire to hear any of their much-praised music ever again, but I was both enthralled and repelled. As when watching any film about the recent past, I had to keep reminding myself: "I was actually alive at that time". I had just seen the wonderful "No country for old men" and it is difficult to decide which was more foreign, alien and bizarre - 1980 Texas or 1978 Manchester, with its rough crowds of disaffected youths which thronged the bare halls where Joy Division performed. The fact that "Control" is shot in black and white further increases its remoteness from present-day Britain, less than 30 years later, as well as underlining the spiritual and material drabness of Curtis' world.

Ian Curtis was younger than my younger sister - until he committed suicide on the same day as my older niece was born, 18th May, 1980. He worked in the Civil Service at the same time that I did, in a separate, but closely related department - the Department of Employment (I was in the Department of Social Security). When Joy Division drive south for their first gig in London, they cram into a Ford Cortina (Mark 3) estate car; my first car was the sedan version. Ian Curtis may wear a jacket with the word "HATE" in huge letters on the back as he goes to work in the dreary government office (even less appealing than my DSS premises in the centre of Reading). But much of the time he does not come across as a hate-filled misfit; he seems a polite, considerate and gently spoken misfit. Unlike the hirsute rock stars in regular groups, he looks a typically well groomed junior civil servant, much like me around that same age.

The North-West part of England has long been its most Christian area. There are any number of thriving churches around Manchester, but they are invisible in "Control". The old quip about "Hatch, match and despatch" (Baptism, wedding and funeral) being the only time British people enter a church certainly applied here. There is a very fleeting glimpse of Curtis' wedding. A longer shot of his funeral focuses on the belching chimney of the crematorium. This was surely intended to evoke the Nazi concentration camp chimneys - the only way that most of the inmates left.

Even creepier was the casting of the excellent Romanian/German actress Alexandra Lara as Curtis' Belgian lover. Her unforgettable previous role was as Hitler's secretary in "Downfall". In that film, the only time God is mentioned is by Magda Goebbels, wife of the repulsive Nazi propaganda minister. When she writes to her oldest son explaining that she is going to murder her six youngest children, she declares that God will forgive her. You might have thought that, with the vengeful Russians closing in and one of the biggest battles of WW2 raging above their heads, even the inmates of Hitler's bunker might have said a prayer or two. But prayer is not shown in an otherwise superb movie. Contrary to the old saying, it looked as if there were nothing but atheists in this most desperate of foxholes. Like Ian Curtis, many of them kill themselves rather than face the post-Nazi world; unlike Ian Curtis, some also murder their families.

In the equally good U-boat movie, "The Boat", made a generation earlier, the tough submarine crew are shown to have religious feelings. As the boat plunges uncontrollably into the depths after being attacked by a British aircraft, a young sailor prays desperately in what he thinks will be his last few seconds before the hull is crushed like a matchbox. When the boat lands miraculously on a shallow spot, the captain declares "A merciful God sent a shovelful of sand to hold us up". In the 23 years between"The Boat" (1981) and "Downfall" (2004), you can sense a religious revolution as well as the political transformation of Germany.

All commentators on the punk phenomenon refer to the impact of 1970s industrial decline and unemployment fuelling the alienation and rage of the musicians and their followers. No one seems to refer to the parallel decline of religious life in Britain, ten years after the disintegration of much mainstream Christian teaching in the 1960s. What intelligent youngster could take any Church seriously when the Churches' own leaders were denying traditional Christian doctrines or abandoning beautiful centuries-old liturgies? Political commitment and action seemed equally unappealing, given the careerism of mainstream British party politicians and the flakiness and doctrinaire fanaticism of the fringe political movements. So what was left to fill the God-shaped hole except a brutish nihilism?

Yet nihilism is self-exhausting and the harshness of the atheist world view appeals to a minority of the human race. Most people seek some warm and comfort in a cold universe and world-wide it is very obvious that God is not dead. But in the thirty years since the birth of punk, the mainstream British Christian churches have continued their long-term decline. The end result of the "Decade of Evangelisation" by the Anglican Church in the1990s was that their church attendance slid below the psychological million mark. The Catholic Church has fared no better, with every vital statistic on baptisms, weddings and attendance heading south. The one contrast is the evangelical churches, with their firm Biblical teaching being rewarded by a steady increase in membership.

Their external enemies have been assisted by countless errors and misdemeanors by Church leaders and clergy. The latest gaff by the Archbishop of Canterbury resulted in the poor man receiving massive public vilification. It made the ferocious media treatment of Derek Conway, the corrupt MP I mentioned in an earlier post, look restrained and merciful in comparison. Most people tend to cynically assume that politicians are as bent as a straight banana, but still think that Christian leaders ought to defend Christian teaching and society. So when Archbishop Williams delivered a long and nuanced speech about Sharia law becoming part of British life, he was handled as gently as an antelope in the jaws of a hungry lion. Whatever carefully considered argument he wished to advance was lost in the gleeful parade of soundbites extracted from his speech, which could be twisted to suggest he was in favour of amputating thieves' hands and stoning adulterers. With leaders like him, you don't need Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

In an earlier post, I mentioned the impact of market forces on the practical teaching of Catholic and other clergy. The deficiencies of the mainstream churches and the basic human need for spiritual solace have created market niches for any number of new churches to flourish. Perhaps appropriately, some of the newcomers find themselves in commercial premises rather than conventional religious buildings. Reading Family church has its base in a shop/office on London Street.The New Testament Church of God (heavily West Indian) holds its worship in a former cinema in Caversham, a northern suburb. Another West Indian church makes its home among the warehouses and workshops of the Portman Road industrial estate.

Much of this activity is visible only if you walk - a further incentive to get out of the car. Walking along Wokingham Road on the east side of town, I was amazed to find that a large but unremarkable house had suddenly become a worship centre for a thriving independent Christian group. A pair of steel gates on Redlands Road in the University area looks like the entrance to a warehouse, but the Brethren community have a large building in there. The "ethnic minority" churches within a larger church are also near invisible. The separate Hungarian, Ukrainian and Sri Lanka masses are held in regular Catholic churches. The Greek Orthodox community shares the Anglican St Bartholomews Church.

Is Reading exceptional in all this activity? One commercial enterprise would suggest not. Like Des Moines, Iowa, Reading is regarded as THE typical town for market researchers checking out a sample of the national population. When it comes to marketing a new breakfast cereal, car or credit card, if enough people buy it in Reading, the country as a whole will buy enough. So you tend to get an astonishing number of smiling middle aged ladies with clipboards ready to catch your eye and ask you questions about your tastes in restaurants, teabags or travellers cheques. It suggests that Reading is most likely typical of much of Britain in religious behaviour.

Has anyone added up all these "little" churches separate from the mainstream Christian congregations to see what the active Christian population of Britain is? At least one website (www.vexan.co.uk/UK/religion.html) packs an awful lot of really awful religious statistical news into a relatively small space. It is compiled by an atheist from credible sources and offers many amusing reflections, such as "Do Jedi Knights count as atheists?" and the difficulty of counting Satanists. Even packing all the small churches into the headcount, it suggests that only 6% of the British population attend Christian churches regularly. Perhaps 50% of the population declare a belief in God, though that should not be interpreted, as it often is, as belief in anything resembling orthodox Christian teachings. It leaves a lot of people with no solid basis for ethical conduct and no consolation at times of greatest distress. No wonder the punkers enjoyed such success.