I never have any difficulty waking early. This is a great advantage on Sunday when I can catch the ghetto slot reserved for religious broadcasting by the BBC.
As Roger Bolton, the doyen of British religious broadcasting points out, religious broadcasting is a weak relation within the BBC family. All the political staff are concentrated in London - because Parliament, the Queen, the Prime Minister and most political functions, such as major government departments, are in London. All the economic staff are in London. Obviously - the Stock Exchange and a huge number of major company HQs are in London. Well, the Archbishop of Canterbury is in London - at Lambeth Palace. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor is in London. The Chief Rabbi is in London. The Methodist HQ is in London. The Muslim Council of Great Britain is in London. And where is BBC Religious Broadcasting based? Er, in Manchester, 250 miles to the north. I love Manchester. It is a vibrant city with a terrific cultural scene, entertainment and shopping galore, a Chinatown, an interesting ethnic mix of restaurants, and an active religious life. It deserves its unofficial title of the "Capital of the North". But it ain't London. Despite the huge BBC HQ on Oxford Road in Manchester, there is an inevitable perception that any department based there is of secondary importance.
In the same spirit, the main religious programs on Radio 4 get shoved into Sunday morning between 600am and 9am when much of the population are enjoying a lie-in or sleeping off the excesses of Friday and Saturday nights. But they don't know what they are missing. After the news headlines at 600am, you can enjoy "Something understood" a long established quasi-religious program which has a different theme each week. To quote its nebulous mission statement: "Each week the programme examines some of the larger questions of life, taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry."
Issues covered have included The Past, Desires, Happiness and Motherhood. The mood is typically reflective and thoughtful rather than specifically spiritual, but it provides an obvious platform for religious perspectives on that week's topic. And it always introduces me to new poetry, music and songs which I would never have encountered otherwise. Under the long time authorship of Mark Tully, the BBC's veteran India correspondent and resident in India, it is a peculiar and fascinating corner of the broadcasting week. It is repeated later on Sunday if you could not wake up on Sunday morning. You can enjoy it from 1130 to 1155pm, when its relaxed pace fits equally well into an end-of-the-day mood.
Then at 635am you have the Farming program. Well, that's logical. Only farmers and religious nutcases are awake at that ungodly hour. And the broadcasts from different parts of the British countryside often complement the atmosphere of "Something understood". Part of the appeal of radio is that the listener's imagination has to supplement the journalist's description of the beautiful piece of countryside where he is walking with the farmer. You can't help feeling that farmers are that bit closer to God, being intimately surrounded by His creation, so a secular farming program is less of an intrusion into the God Slot than the usual depressing news headlines.
At 700am you have another set of news headlines, followed by "Sunday", Roger Bolton's stamping ground. This is a general magazine news program, covering 5 or 6 topics from the week's religious happenings, in the UK and elsewhere. It is invariably interesting, but I occasionally find myself irritated at the superficiality of treatment of some topics. It is not Roger's fault in any way; you just cannot do justice to the vast majority of serious topics, secular or sacred, in five or ten minute slots.
800am brings a longer news broadcast, followed by "Morning Worship" at 810. This is usually a very straightforward broadcast of a Christian service from some part of Britain. To fulfill their remit as the British Broadcasting Corporation, they visit all parts of the UK over the course of the year. But even religious broadcasters can't resist the lure of a free foreign trip, if the budget can stand it. So you get occasional treats from any part of the world, such as a recent Mass from "St Paul's outside the Walls" in Rome. Obviously all concerned have been rehearsed exhaustively and the programs are planned and produced by meticulous professionals.Certain aspects, such as the copyright of broadcasted hymns, need extra attention which an ordinary parish service would never require. But the vast majority of participants are ordinary clergy, choir members and congregations, not broadcasting professionals. By 800am I am on my way to Mass and hear part of this program in the car. Again, I have heard any number of inspiring new hymns on these services.
Then you have the news again at 900am and the Radio 4 programming changes gear back to secular material, with the regular review of the week's media action. And so it goes on all day. And all the rest of the week. Religious material intrudes for short periods each day, with a "Thought for the day" for a few minutes each morning in the middle of the rolling news program. There is the "Daily Worship" in the middle of each morning for 15 minutes or so - when a large majority of the population are at work or school. But that program enjoys the record as the longest running radio program in the world, having been going continuously since 1926.
It would be unfair to pick on Radio 4, as they deliver more religious broadcasting than most other radio stations put together. And it provides a visible religious presence outside the small number of specifically religious radio stations and TV channels.These services, whether at home or abroad, are hugely appreciated by the sick and housebound.
We had a taste of this in January 1993 when an independent TV company broadcast a Mass from St James on one of the commercial TV channels. We received appreciative letters from all over the country, including a delightful elderly Polish lady who wrote an ecstatic message to our parish priest addressing him by all his titles. The Mass was broadcast live, so our parish priest, organist and choir were really performing without a safety net - unlike BBC religious broadcasts, which are prerecorded and edited to ensure maximum quality. Not surprisingly, we had seven full scale rehearsals to get ready and were all sick to death of the hymns well before broadcasting day. I had two video recorders running at home to tape the service and when I played it back it was a relief to see that none of the blunders were ours. The flaws were all technical: a bad camera wobble during the first reading, the camera in the centre aisle moving into the frame as it tracked towards the altar and a brief interruption when the uplink to the satellite failed for a minute or so. All of this would of course been removed by the editors if it had been a BBC gig.
The most obvious gaffe of all was the final hymn. The Mass was timed to fill the 1100am-midday slot on ITV. But we finished a few minutes early. We sung " I am the Bread of Life" as the final hymn. As we reached the last line: "I will raise him up on the last daaaay..." and our organist played the long final chord, the floor manager frantically signalled "Keep going! Keep going!" The organist restarted the hymn immediately, with hardly a beat's break, and we sung the whole hymn through twice more to pad out the time until after midday. The camera tracked pointlessly up and down the centre aisle; there was nothing else to focus on because Mass was over and the altar was empty. We singers were definitely running out of breath by the time it finished. It was such a contrast to the BBC's religious broadcasts where the sound and camerawork are immaculate.
Also we had a very lucky break as regards outside noise. For years Concorde would fly over Reading at 1130am and 600pm every day en route to New York. The sound was unmistakable and overwhelming, well before you looked up and saw that unique shape. The long penetrating crescendo, followed by its even more reverberant rumbling as it moved away, stopped all conversation on the ground for at least 30 seconds. Concorde was a very old design and its noise was far worse than any modern airliner. The broadcasters and planning team agreed that we would simply have to stop the service in its tracks if Concorde flew over; the noise, even inside St James' stone walls, would swamp the soundtrack. Yet it did not appear during the service and we had a clean soundtrack.
Does religious programming make any difference to most of the population? It is impossible to tell. As I said in an earlier email, modern viewers and listeners are swamped by the choice of channels. Audiences are subdivided into ever thinner slices. If you wanted a dedicated Catholic TV channel, you can find EWTN on SKY satellite or cable - selection 680...... I know at least a few of my fellow parishioners who seek out and love EWTN. So much of modern British life is so brutally secular that any religious presence in the media is an invaluable gift. When I went to a talk by Roger Bolton, he was very anxious that religious programming survive on a mainstream channel and not be pushed out completely into an electronic ghetto of Christian stations speaking only to the converted. Long may the God Slot enrich Sunday morning.
Monday, June 9, 2008
God and Caesar
A few years ago I attended a meeting of the Catholic Newman Society at St James. I can't remember what provoked the question, but one of the audience asked the priest speaker about Catholic teaching on taxation. The good Father merely quoted Christ's advice -" give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." This answer was perfectly true and perfectly useless. Jesus on that occasion was not giving any universal advice on taxation, merely sidestepping a trap laid by the malicious.
It is astonishing that in 2,000 years there has not been much development in Church teaching on the morality of raising, paying and spending taxation. Gathering and spending tax deeply affects everyone in a modern economy, even if, miraculously, they pay no direct taxes themselves. I thought that possibly enclosed nuns and monks might be in such a position, but they interact with the taxed economy if they do something as basic as paying for a phone connection or an electricity supply.
It would be nearly impossible to survive for more than a few days in any modern city without paying or receiving taxes. Every time I ride on public transport in Europe I am in effect receiving a taxation subsidy. On Berlin's superb public transport system the subsidy covered up to 90% of the "true" cost of the trams, buses, U-Bahn and S-Bahn. This subsidy was showered on all users, whether they were paupers or billionaires. And please don't ask me if the subsidy came from taxpayers in the city of Berlin, the region, the German economy as a whole, the European Community or some Byzantine combination of the lot.
Even if I buy a total essential such as food, which is VAT free, part of the price embodies tax costs along the production and distribution chain. Or the food "price" may reflect whopping agricultural subsidies at taxpayers' expense. My sister and niece are part of this racket, as they work at the Intervention Board which distributes subsidies from the taxpayer to British farmers.
I remember being taught as a child that it was our Catholic obligation to pay just taxes, a statement which raised infinitely more questions than it answered. What is "just"? Digging for more subtle advice and insights as an adult is hardly more satisfying. There have been more developed answers, that we cannot withhold taxes on the grounds that part of it may be used for purposes of which we disapprove, e.g. a war or abortion facilities. But this looks like the opinion of particular moralists, rather than a clear teaching of the Ordinary Magisterium. I have seen a statement that Pope Benedict is about to issue a document condemning tax evasion, which in some countries, such as Italy, is practically a national sport. But I have yet to see such a document and have no idea if it is also condemning tax avoidance - i.e. legal skillful reduction of taxes, usually with the help of accountants and lawyers.
A major difficulty for the Magisterium is that taxation and the honesty of governments vary so enormously across the world. Any document from the Vatican has to be universally applicable, but how could any advice which covers countries such as Northern European democracies and the kleptocracies of much of Africa be more than bland generalities? Yet the question needs urgent consideration on so many levels.
Firstly, taxation is removing resources from individuals and companies to politicians and civil servants. However "competently" the latter use the money, it is a plain example of opportunity cost which is hardly ever analysed. To what better use could the individual or business have put that money? So much money is sucked away and people accept the plunder as an unavoidable part of life, like the weather. No one considers how they might have used that tax directly for their own benefit and that of family, friends, parish and charity. Or how taxes "invisible" to most people, such as heavy company taxation, might have been better spent on creating new products and worthwhile new jobs.
Secondly, money from taxation will inevitably be used less effectively because the public servants have less regard for public money than their own. The extreme illustration of this principle had to be the case of the Scottish politician Donald Dewar who promoted the building of the new Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh. The cost of this building quickly soared from an initial estimate of $80 milllion to a "final" cost of $860 million. I say "final" as an indication of total uncertainty, because the building has proved to embody design and construction defects which will burden the taxpayer with continuing extra costs for the rest of its life. Yet Donald Dewar was notoriously tight-fisted in his personal life. His habit of concealing vol-au-vents and other treats from official buffets in his pockets was legendary and his estate was worth over $5 million when he died after a life of officially modest salaries. Wisely, both he and the architect Mirales died before the full extent of the fiasco became publicly notorious.
The layers of scandal and incompetence on this relatively small rip-off beggar belief - or rather they would beggar belief if they were not so routine in British public spending. For example, the Spanish architect Mirales had no certificate from a British professional architectural association which would have permitted him to design a British public building with British taxpayers' money. After the cost overrun became general knowledge, it was revealed that he had designed a sports centre in Spain whose roof collapsed; this mishap earned him the title "El Callapso" from the Spanish media. Not surprisingly, the Scottish Parliament's debating chamber was evacuated hastily soon after completion when one of the oak beams in the elaborate interlocking roof structure broke loose at one end.
Obviously anyone commissioning a private or business building with their own hard-earned money would never have behaved with such insouciance, either in hiring the essential workers or controlling expenditure. Plainly this sort of monstrous incompetence is a massive crime against all taxpayers and an enormous sin. Yet it is routine in all branches of Government expenditure.
Thirdly, the uses to which taxation are put are often visibly, directly and indisputably evil. Obvious examples include abortion facilities and the waging of illegal wars. Once the political decision has been made and laws passed by deluded and/or depraved politicians, reversal of such evil is near impossible.
Fourthly, taxation may be used to facilitate evil and make it far more widespread than it would otherwise be. I mentioned in earlier posts one obvious example: how generous social security provision in Britain makes it far easier for a parent (usually the father) to abandon one family and start another.
Two extreme British examples made banner headlines in early 2008. The abduction and rescue of Shannon Matthews, a 9 year old girl in Yorkshire, gave rise to huge rejoicing at her safe return to her mother after nearly four weeks in the clutches of a kidnapper. The reporting was spiced by the revelation that Shannon was one of seven children who her mother had produced with the help of four, five or six fathers, depending on which version you believed. Also the kidnapper turned out to be the uncle of the mother's current live-in lover. The Yorkshire police came in for vociferous criticism from the usual armchair experts. They had mounted the biggest search since the Yorkshire Ripper investigation in the 1970s, but it had taken them over three weeks to find the girl when she was imprisoned only a mile from her home.
To be fair, as one police spokesman explained, there was such a network of "family associates" to investigate, all with axes and grudges to grind. I should say there were. Normally when a child disappears, the male relatives are among the top suspects, but the list of Usual Suspects was much longer here. The very vocabulary of "traditional family" life is inadequate now. We need new coinages such as "para-sibling" or "para-uncle" to describe the people who have some sort of loose connection to the genetic relations but are not formally related by blood or legal recognition..
Now the mother's current live-in lover has been arrested by the police on suspicion of possession of indecent images of children. It was another uncomfortable reminder that the biggest factor in child abuse is having an unrelated male living in the same house - providing maximum temptation and maximum opportunity. But then the general public is seldom reminded of this link, at least in part because so many people in politics and the media have messy domestic lives. Less still does anyone proclaim that traditional marriage is the best guarantee of long-term happiness and effective child rearing. Obviously no one quotes Jesus' comment on a child molester - that he would be better cast into the sea with a millstone round his neck. What would He have recommended for those who facilitate abuse on an industrial scale?
The second example was the murder of Scarlett Keeling, a 15 year old English girl in Goa. She was one of 9 siblings or half-siblings from one mother and four or more fathers. The mother had been able to take the whole clan (minus the fathers, of course) on a 6 month trip to India. She had been able to save $14,000 from her benefits to finance the journey. The scale of this fecklessness broke all normal barriers; no normal person could ever afford to take 6 months off from their normal lives and responsibilities.
Plainly neither of these menages could have survived a week without massive State subsidies. Very clearly the easy availability of Social Security encouraged gross irresponsibilty (or monstrous immorality if you want to use religious language) in these cases. There are countless other "families" in similar circumstances, but who are fortunate enough to stay out of the media - until some disaster swings the spotlight their way for a day or two. Even the most depraved and dim witted member of the underclass would call a halt after the third or fourth illegitimate child - unless State allowances continued to pour in and indeed increase with every new child.
In those circumstances, mass illegitimacy, serial polygamy and serial polyandry become rational economic choices, especially for the low paid who could not otherwise afford a large family. In fact, the luckless British taxpayer, in defiance of all Christian tradition and current British law, is now to pay for parallel polygamy - where Moslem husbands claiming social security have more than one wife. I have not yet heard of any bizarre cult devotee claiming social security for multiple simultaneous husbands. But the logic of Human Rights legislation (heavily pushed by Tony Blair's equally repulsive lawyer wife Cherie) and Equal Opportunity legislation would make a polyandrous claim undeniable.
Fifthly, taxation encourages massive dependence on the state. The dependence on State benefit has reached grotesque proportions in Britain, where nearly a million Poles and other East Europeans have arrived in less than four years and quickly established themselves in the workforce. There are so many here doing so many essential jobs that they are almost certainly permanent additions to the UK population. But hundreds of thousands of able-bodied native Britons continue to draw benefits and turn up their noses at the sort of work the Poles are doing. In a notorious example, when the British unemployed in a town were told that Poles were making up to £25,000 ($50,000) a year working on local farms, they still preferred to stay on Social Security.
Sixthly, high taxation encourages massive corruption in numerous forms. Even worse than maintaining the idle in idleness is expanding the State payroll. As one fellow civil servant said to me around 1980, much of the work done by his Department would be better left undone. And we cost the productive taxpayers far more than the unemployed. And the pay of a civil servant is much less than the fees of the thousands of "consultants" who have latched onto state money. And the plunder by consultants is dwarfed by corporations who know how to work the system to land government contracts or subsidies. And all these mouths receiving state money have a vested interest in maintaining and indeed expanding the status quo.
The long-running joke about Nigeria is that it is a country where everyone is united in condemning corruption and equally united in practising it. This gibe is equally applicable to much of Europe now. The corruption of individual Members of Parliament has attracted an undue share of media attention, but it is a useful sample of the much more grotesque theft noted above. As I said in an earlier post, corrupt MPs make the mistake of embezzling relatively small sums which most of us could easily understand. Mick Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons (one of the most senior officials in the land, paid a basic salary of $275,000 per year) has been caught out paying $8,000 of taxpayers' money for taxi fares for his wife. The media uproar about this embezzlement was out of all proportion to the offence; $8,000 is the price of a second hand car, or a good family holiday. Still, in an earlier and more honourable generation he would have resigned instantly. But this thieving crook has not resigned or even apologized. Why should he feel any sense of shame when so many others are making so much more from the taxpayer? And as Speaker of the House, he is well near-impossible to fire.
Seventhly, the concentration of power in the State is a plain contradiction of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which advocates that functions be carried out at the lowest possible level - family, neighbours, parish, local charities, town council, regional body, with a national organisation intervening only if all these successive layers have failed. And this intervention should support the work of the lower layers of society, not override them or absorb them.
So why the deafening silence from the Church on taxation? Part of the problem is the obvious Church complicity in the racket. Examples include Catholic charities in the US receiving tax dollars and thus government control, or the long-established German practice of receiving "church taxes" as part of the secular income tax collection process. Even secular France pays for the maintenance of ancient Church buildings. In an earlier post I noted how one group of "Catholic" clerics is funded by the European Union (i.e. the European taxpayers) as a propaganda front for the EU. The large network of Catholic schools in the UK is largely funded out of taxation. It is hardly surprising that a recent document "Taxation for the common good" by the British Catholic bishops seemed to blindly and blandly accept so much of the status quo on taxation policy. Or that a reviewer in Faith magazine was so dismissive of radical new policies on tax and government spending proposed by a think tank. Too many of the great and good in Catholic life accept the welfare state almost as something ordained by God.
Also many Catholic clergy in so many countries seem obliged to cosey up to politicians, or positively seem to enjoy their visible connections to tax-fueled power. The prime British example is our local lad Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor and Tony Blair. The prime US example must be the Kennedy clan and the Boston archdiocese. The senior clergy and their subordinates thus become compromised in proclaiming Catholic teaching. I do not give a fig what excuses they offer about exercising "behind the scenes" influence; any "friendly" relations are plainly worthless when it comes to the crunch, such as recent Parliamentary decisions on legislation on embryo research and fertility treatment.
I await Pope Benedict's advice on paying tax with interest but suspect that there will be little radically new thinking in it.
It is astonishing that in 2,000 years there has not been much development in Church teaching on the morality of raising, paying and spending taxation. Gathering and spending tax deeply affects everyone in a modern economy, even if, miraculously, they pay no direct taxes themselves. I thought that possibly enclosed nuns and monks might be in such a position, but they interact with the taxed economy if they do something as basic as paying for a phone connection or an electricity supply.
It would be nearly impossible to survive for more than a few days in any modern city without paying or receiving taxes. Every time I ride on public transport in Europe I am in effect receiving a taxation subsidy. On Berlin's superb public transport system the subsidy covered up to 90% of the "true" cost of the trams, buses, U-Bahn and S-Bahn. This subsidy was showered on all users, whether they were paupers or billionaires. And please don't ask me if the subsidy came from taxpayers in the city of Berlin, the region, the German economy as a whole, the European Community or some Byzantine combination of the lot.
Even if I buy a total essential such as food, which is VAT free, part of the price embodies tax costs along the production and distribution chain. Or the food "price" may reflect whopping agricultural subsidies at taxpayers' expense. My sister and niece are part of this racket, as they work at the Intervention Board which distributes subsidies from the taxpayer to British farmers.
I remember being taught as a child that it was our Catholic obligation to pay just taxes, a statement which raised infinitely more questions than it answered. What is "just"? Digging for more subtle advice and insights as an adult is hardly more satisfying. There have been more developed answers, that we cannot withhold taxes on the grounds that part of it may be used for purposes of which we disapprove, e.g. a war or abortion facilities. But this looks like the opinion of particular moralists, rather than a clear teaching of the Ordinary Magisterium. I have seen a statement that Pope Benedict is about to issue a document condemning tax evasion, which in some countries, such as Italy, is practically a national sport. But I have yet to see such a document and have no idea if it is also condemning tax avoidance - i.e. legal skillful reduction of taxes, usually with the help of accountants and lawyers.
A major difficulty for the Magisterium is that taxation and the honesty of governments vary so enormously across the world. Any document from the Vatican has to be universally applicable, but how could any advice which covers countries such as Northern European democracies and the kleptocracies of much of Africa be more than bland generalities? Yet the question needs urgent consideration on so many levels.
Firstly, taxation is removing resources from individuals and companies to politicians and civil servants. However "competently" the latter use the money, it is a plain example of opportunity cost which is hardly ever analysed. To what better use could the individual or business have put that money? So much money is sucked away and people accept the plunder as an unavoidable part of life, like the weather. No one considers how they might have used that tax directly for their own benefit and that of family, friends, parish and charity. Or how taxes "invisible" to most people, such as heavy company taxation, might have been better spent on creating new products and worthwhile new jobs.
Secondly, money from taxation will inevitably be used less effectively because the public servants have less regard for public money than their own. The extreme illustration of this principle had to be the case of the Scottish politician Donald Dewar who promoted the building of the new Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh. The cost of this building quickly soared from an initial estimate of $80 milllion to a "final" cost of $860 million. I say "final" as an indication of total uncertainty, because the building has proved to embody design and construction defects which will burden the taxpayer with continuing extra costs for the rest of its life. Yet Donald Dewar was notoriously tight-fisted in his personal life. His habit of concealing vol-au-vents and other treats from official buffets in his pockets was legendary and his estate was worth over $5 million when he died after a life of officially modest salaries. Wisely, both he and the architect Mirales died before the full extent of the fiasco became publicly notorious.
The layers of scandal and incompetence on this relatively small rip-off beggar belief - or rather they would beggar belief if they were not so routine in British public spending. For example, the Spanish architect Mirales had no certificate from a British professional architectural association which would have permitted him to design a British public building with British taxpayers' money. After the cost overrun became general knowledge, it was revealed that he had designed a sports centre in Spain whose roof collapsed; this mishap earned him the title "El Callapso" from the Spanish media. Not surprisingly, the Scottish Parliament's debating chamber was evacuated hastily soon after completion when one of the oak beams in the elaborate interlocking roof structure broke loose at one end.
Obviously anyone commissioning a private or business building with their own hard-earned money would never have behaved with such insouciance, either in hiring the essential workers or controlling expenditure. Plainly this sort of monstrous incompetence is a massive crime against all taxpayers and an enormous sin. Yet it is routine in all branches of Government expenditure.
Thirdly, the uses to which taxation are put are often visibly, directly and indisputably evil. Obvious examples include abortion facilities and the waging of illegal wars. Once the political decision has been made and laws passed by deluded and/or depraved politicians, reversal of such evil is near impossible.
Fourthly, taxation may be used to facilitate evil and make it far more widespread than it would otherwise be. I mentioned in earlier posts one obvious example: how generous social security provision in Britain makes it far easier for a parent (usually the father) to abandon one family and start another.
Two extreme British examples made banner headlines in early 2008. The abduction and rescue of Shannon Matthews, a 9 year old girl in Yorkshire, gave rise to huge rejoicing at her safe return to her mother after nearly four weeks in the clutches of a kidnapper. The reporting was spiced by the revelation that Shannon was one of seven children who her mother had produced with the help of four, five or six fathers, depending on which version you believed. Also the kidnapper turned out to be the uncle of the mother's current live-in lover. The Yorkshire police came in for vociferous criticism from the usual armchair experts. They had mounted the biggest search since the Yorkshire Ripper investigation in the 1970s, but it had taken them over three weeks to find the girl when she was imprisoned only a mile from her home.
To be fair, as one police spokesman explained, there was such a network of "family associates" to investigate, all with axes and grudges to grind. I should say there were. Normally when a child disappears, the male relatives are among the top suspects, but the list of Usual Suspects was much longer here. The very vocabulary of "traditional family" life is inadequate now. We need new coinages such as "para-sibling" or "para-uncle" to describe the people who have some sort of loose connection to the genetic relations but are not formally related by blood or legal recognition..
Now the mother's current live-in lover has been arrested by the police on suspicion of possession of indecent images of children. It was another uncomfortable reminder that the biggest factor in child abuse is having an unrelated male living in the same house - providing maximum temptation and maximum opportunity. But then the general public is seldom reminded of this link, at least in part because so many people in politics and the media have messy domestic lives. Less still does anyone proclaim that traditional marriage is the best guarantee of long-term happiness and effective child rearing. Obviously no one quotes Jesus' comment on a child molester - that he would be better cast into the sea with a millstone round his neck. What would He have recommended for those who facilitate abuse on an industrial scale?
The second example was the murder of Scarlett Keeling, a 15 year old English girl in Goa. She was one of 9 siblings or half-siblings from one mother and four or more fathers. The mother had been able to take the whole clan (minus the fathers, of course) on a 6 month trip to India. She had been able to save $14,000 from her benefits to finance the journey. The scale of this fecklessness broke all normal barriers; no normal person could ever afford to take 6 months off from their normal lives and responsibilities.
Plainly neither of these menages could have survived a week without massive State subsidies. Very clearly the easy availability of Social Security encouraged gross irresponsibilty (or monstrous immorality if you want to use religious language) in these cases. There are countless other "families" in similar circumstances, but who are fortunate enough to stay out of the media - until some disaster swings the spotlight their way for a day or two. Even the most depraved and dim witted member of the underclass would call a halt after the third or fourth illegitimate child - unless State allowances continued to pour in and indeed increase with every new child.
In those circumstances, mass illegitimacy, serial polygamy and serial polyandry become rational economic choices, especially for the low paid who could not otherwise afford a large family. In fact, the luckless British taxpayer, in defiance of all Christian tradition and current British law, is now to pay for parallel polygamy - where Moslem husbands claiming social security have more than one wife. I have not yet heard of any bizarre cult devotee claiming social security for multiple simultaneous husbands. But the logic of Human Rights legislation (heavily pushed by Tony Blair's equally repulsive lawyer wife Cherie) and Equal Opportunity legislation would make a polyandrous claim undeniable.
Fifthly, taxation encourages massive dependence on the state. The dependence on State benefit has reached grotesque proportions in Britain, where nearly a million Poles and other East Europeans have arrived in less than four years and quickly established themselves in the workforce. There are so many here doing so many essential jobs that they are almost certainly permanent additions to the UK population. But hundreds of thousands of able-bodied native Britons continue to draw benefits and turn up their noses at the sort of work the Poles are doing. In a notorious example, when the British unemployed in a town were told that Poles were making up to £25,000 ($50,000) a year working on local farms, they still preferred to stay on Social Security.
Sixthly, high taxation encourages massive corruption in numerous forms. Even worse than maintaining the idle in idleness is expanding the State payroll. As one fellow civil servant said to me around 1980, much of the work done by his Department would be better left undone. And we cost the productive taxpayers far more than the unemployed. And the pay of a civil servant is much less than the fees of the thousands of "consultants" who have latched onto state money. And the plunder by consultants is dwarfed by corporations who know how to work the system to land government contracts or subsidies. And all these mouths receiving state money have a vested interest in maintaining and indeed expanding the status quo.
The long-running joke about Nigeria is that it is a country where everyone is united in condemning corruption and equally united in practising it. This gibe is equally applicable to much of Europe now. The corruption of individual Members of Parliament has attracted an undue share of media attention, but it is a useful sample of the much more grotesque theft noted above. As I said in an earlier post, corrupt MPs make the mistake of embezzling relatively small sums which most of us could easily understand. Mick Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons (one of the most senior officials in the land, paid a basic salary of $275,000 per year) has been caught out paying $8,000 of taxpayers' money for taxi fares for his wife. The media uproar about this embezzlement was out of all proportion to the offence; $8,000 is the price of a second hand car, or a good family holiday. Still, in an earlier and more honourable generation he would have resigned instantly. But this thieving crook has not resigned or even apologized. Why should he feel any sense of shame when so many others are making so much more from the taxpayer? And as Speaker of the House, he is well near-impossible to fire.
Seventhly, the concentration of power in the State is a plain contradiction of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which advocates that functions be carried out at the lowest possible level - family, neighbours, parish, local charities, town council, regional body, with a national organisation intervening only if all these successive layers have failed. And this intervention should support the work of the lower layers of society, not override them or absorb them.
So why the deafening silence from the Church on taxation? Part of the problem is the obvious Church complicity in the racket. Examples include Catholic charities in the US receiving tax dollars and thus government control, or the long-established German practice of receiving "church taxes" as part of the secular income tax collection process. Even secular France pays for the maintenance of ancient Church buildings. In an earlier post I noted how one group of "Catholic" clerics is funded by the European Union (i.e. the European taxpayers) as a propaganda front for the EU. The large network of Catholic schools in the UK is largely funded out of taxation. It is hardly surprising that a recent document "Taxation for the common good" by the British Catholic bishops seemed to blindly and blandly accept so much of the status quo on taxation policy. Or that a reviewer in Faith magazine was so dismissive of radical new policies on tax and government spending proposed by a think tank. Too many of the great and good in Catholic life accept the welfare state almost as something ordained by God.
Also many Catholic clergy in so many countries seem obliged to cosey up to politicians, or positively seem to enjoy their visible connections to tax-fueled power. The prime British example is our local lad Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor and Tony Blair. The prime US example must be the Kennedy clan and the Boston archdiocese. The senior clergy and their subordinates thus become compromised in proclaiming Catholic teaching. I do not give a fig what excuses they offer about exercising "behind the scenes" influence; any "friendly" relations are plainly worthless when it comes to the crunch, such as recent Parliamentary decisions on legislation on embryo research and fertility treatment.
I await Pope Benedict's advice on paying tax with interest but suspect that there will be little radically new thinking in it.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
If God is Dead
If God is Dead, His ghost keeps reappearing in some very unexpected places. I was watching a repeat of an interview with the late lamented director Antony Minghella, who directed "The English Patient", "The talented Mr Ripley" and other notable movies. He sadly died recently and unexpectedly at the age of 54. In his conversation with Mark Lawson (an arts-oriented journalist for the BBC, the Guardian and various publications), Minghella mentioned his practice of examining his conscience every night before retiring to bed. This is the first time I have heard that phrase used in years - I can't remember the last time I heard it used in church. As far as I know, Minghella was not a believing or practising Catholic in adult life, despite his Italian ancestry. But he was a very intelligent and thoughtful man who obviously still appreciated the value of this discipline. As an ex-Catholic himself, Mark Lawson must have understood this disclosure far more deeply than the majority of the British audience.
In the fascinating French movie "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", the firmly non-religious editor of "Elle" magazine is catastrophically paralysed by a stroke. He is so comprehensively immobilised that he cannot even move his tongue or his lips and thus cannot speak. Theodore Dalrymple, who moved to France to escape the barbarities of modern England, commented that France is the least Catholic of Catholic countries. But the editor cannot escape the residual religious influences in his country. One of his dedicated therapists prays fervently for him and takes him to Mass in his wheelchair. She and the priest air the idea of taking him to Lourdes on pilgrimage, which sparks off his hilarious reminiscence of a trip to Lourdes with one of his mistresses when he was able bodied. They ended up in one of the gloriously tacky souvenir shops, which give tawdry garbage a bad name.
Having been to Lourdes many times, I have fond memories of such emporia, some of which are skillfully targetted at the English speaking pilgrims and especially the Irish, though any of them speak enough English to relieve you of your money. My particular favourite piece of junk was the plastic holy water bottle in the shape of the Madonna, with the screw cap on her crowned head. However, the editor's mistress takes a fancy to a much more expensive souvenir, a huge illuminated Madonna ("blessed by the Cardinal", as the shopkeeper advises her). The editor pays 1,899 francs (around $300) for this monstrosity to keep her happy and they haul it back to the hotel. (For me, this was an extra happy reminder of pre-Euro France). With this flashing statue glowing and dominating the bedroom, he is too embarrassed to have sex with his mistress and they split up shortly afterwards.
To be fair, there are a few shops in Lourdes where you can buy beautiful religious artifacts at very reasonable prices, but religious megastores such as "Palais du Rosaire" are on the most prominent sites and attract the most attention. It was such a surprise seeing Lourdes in this movie; I had seen the shrine depicted only in two earlier films, "The Song of Bernadette" (1943), starring Jennifer Jones, and "Bernadette" (1988), starring Sydney Penney. Mind you, the very reverent "Song of Bernadette" has a truly bizarre background. As the noted American Catholic writer E Michael Jones commented, here you had a novel by a Jewish Anarchist author on the run from the Nazis being turned into a movie in an astonishingly short timescale by Hollywood Babylon. Not to mention the later letdown when Saint Jennifer Jones married her divorced producer.
As I noted in an earlier post, most American and European movies are grotesquely evasive and unrealistic in their treatment of religious attitudes. Even in the face of crises such as terminal illness or a ferocious battle, the characters are seldom driven to prayer or deeper reflection on their circumstances. So "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" was a refreshing exception. Also it was truthful enough to portray both the editor's suicidal desperation and the pain caused by his callousness in leaving his partner and children for a younger mistress. The abandoned children still loved him and one daughter prayed desperately every night for his recovery, while his abandoned partner visited and helped him. The utter verbal confusion in family relations which I noted in my previous post surfaces here also. When the doctor tells the paralysed and mute editor that his wife wants to see him, his irritated voiceover declares: "She's not my wife, she's the mother of my children!" (The partner/wife is played by
Emmanuelle Seigner, better known as Mrs Roman Polanski, so it looked extra odd, to my eyes at least, that the actor playing the editor is the spitting image of Mr Polanski. It was also wonderful to see that even provincial French hospitals recruit only the most gorgeous girls as therapists!)
Winston Churchill commented in a speech in June 1941, just after Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union: "There are times when all pray". His reference was to the supposedly atheist Russian women desperately praying for the safety of their men at the front. Desperate circumstances encourage spiritual seeking. I saw the fascinating little play "Women of Lockerbie" at our local Progress Theatre recently. The little town of Lockerbie in south-west Scotland was an obscure backwater until the terrible night just before Christmas 1988 when Pan Am flight 103 exploded above it, killing 259 passengers and crew and 11 people in the town. This peaceful little town and its surrounding countryside were strewn with wreckage, bodies and bits of bodies. This very moving play was unusual in that its characters, both Scottish and American, pondered the impact of this horrible disaster on their faith and understanding of God and His presence in human affairs. Their comments were desperate questions rather than any illuminating insights, but it is not often you hear such matters aired in the modern theatre. It seemed particularly incongruous hearing it in a place like the Progress Theatre, which was founded in 1935. At that time "Progress", always a cant word, would have been synonymous with the advance of socialism and the worship of Stalin.
At the Lectio Divina group at my church, another parishioner reminded us of ancient Catholic symbolism of the scallop shell, the emblem of St James, patron of our parish. As a child, one of my teachers told us that medieval pilgrims on the long and dangerous journey to the shrine of St James at Compostela in Spain would wear such a shell. This badge was allegedly a signal to brigands and highwaymen to give them a break. A few miles north-west of Reading, there is the ancient Catholic estate of Mapledurham. Its fine house boasts at least one priest hole, used to conceal priests from the English Government agents who would have arrested and executed them. As Mapledurham is on the River Thames, many of the priests came and left by boat to minimise the risk of arrest on their journeys. If a priest was in residence at Mapledurham, three shells would be displayed in a window to discretely indicate that Mass could be heard there. And at Reading University you see this triple shell emblem everywhere as part of the University's shield; on the information leaflets, on the sides of University vehicles, on wall plaques. The University's website explains:
"The arms of the University of Reading were granted on 7 August 1896 when the newly incorporated University Extension College, Reading was still part of Oxford University. This was thirty years before it was granted a Royal charter and became a university in its own right. The simple and effective coat is one of only six armorial bearings adopted or granted by English universities before the turn of the 20th Century.
The three scallop shells on the upper part of the shield had been the arms of Reading Abbey founded in 1121 and their presence serves as a reminder that the first college was once part of the Abbey.
Since at least 1130, the scallop had been the special badge of the pilgrims to the shrine of St James the Greater at Santiago de Compostela in Spain. By the end of the 12th century it had also become the emblem of James the Apostle. Reading Abbey acquired as its principal relic, the hand of St James and a cult, complete with miracle stories, rapidly developed and eventually the scallop shells appeared on the Abbey’s coat of arms.
It is also possible that the scallop shells might allude to the arms of the local family, the Palmers. Walter Palmer, son of the co-founder of the Huntley and Palmers biscuit firm that came to Reading in the 1840s, was the first President of Reading University Extension College and the family has been and remain benefactors of the University today.
On the lower portion of the shield is the Lancaster Rose set on an engrailed cross (indented along the edge with small curves) and is derived from the arms of Christ Church Oxford, to whose initiative the Extension College owed its foundation. The arms of Christ Church were those of Cardinal Wolsey who in 1525 founded Cardinal College, later renamed as Christ Church by Henry VIII in 1546."
Reading University is hardly noteworthy as a hotbed of piety or Christian learning nowadays, but there are still very unexpected shoots of hope. Apart from the valiant Chaplaincy team, you have David Oderberg in the Philosophy Department who produces wonderful coherent arguments defending the sanctity of life against abortion and embryonic stem cell research. The British Parliament took scant regard of such arguments in their latest outrageous decisions to continue allowing abortion up to 24 weeks gestation and giving the green light to producing human/animal hybrids, but the power of reason and truth is mercifully independent of the power of venality, stupidity and fashion.
In the fascinating French movie "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", the firmly non-religious editor of "Elle" magazine is catastrophically paralysed by a stroke. He is so comprehensively immobilised that he cannot even move his tongue or his lips and thus cannot speak. Theodore Dalrymple, who moved to France to escape the barbarities of modern England, commented that France is the least Catholic of Catholic countries. But the editor cannot escape the residual religious influences in his country. One of his dedicated therapists prays fervently for him and takes him to Mass in his wheelchair. She and the priest air the idea of taking him to Lourdes on pilgrimage, which sparks off his hilarious reminiscence of a trip to Lourdes with one of his mistresses when he was able bodied. They ended up in one of the gloriously tacky souvenir shops, which give tawdry garbage a bad name.
Having been to Lourdes many times, I have fond memories of such emporia, some of which are skillfully targetted at the English speaking pilgrims and especially the Irish, though any of them speak enough English to relieve you of your money. My particular favourite piece of junk was the plastic holy water bottle in the shape of the Madonna, with the screw cap on her crowned head. However, the editor's mistress takes a fancy to a much more expensive souvenir, a huge illuminated Madonna ("blessed by the Cardinal", as the shopkeeper advises her). The editor pays 1,899 francs (around $300) for this monstrosity to keep her happy and they haul it back to the hotel. (For me, this was an extra happy reminder of pre-Euro France). With this flashing statue glowing and dominating the bedroom, he is too embarrassed to have sex with his mistress and they split up shortly afterwards.
To be fair, there are a few shops in Lourdes where you can buy beautiful religious artifacts at very reasonable prices, but religious megastores such as "Palais du Rosaire" are on the most prominent sites and attract the most attention. It was such a surprise seeing Lourdes in this movie; I had seen the shrine depicted only in two earlier films, "The Song of Bernadette" (1943), starring Jennifer Jones, and "Bernadette" (1988), starring Sydney Penney. Mind you, the very reverent "Song of Bernadette" has a truly bizarre background. As the noted American Catholic writer E Michael Jones commented, here you had a novel by a Jewish Anarchist author on the run from the Nazis being turned into a movie in an astonishingly short timescale by Hollywood Babylon. Not to mention the later letdown when Saint Jennifer Jones married her divorced producer.
As I noted in an earlier post, most American and European movies are grotesquely evasive and unrealistic in their treatment of religious attitudes. Even in the face of crises such as terminal illness or a ferocious battle, the characters are seldom driven to prayer or deeper reflection on their circumstances. So "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" was a refreshing exception. Also it was truthful enough to portray both the editor's suicidal desperation and the pain caused by his callousness in leaving his partner and children for a younger mistress. The abandoned children still loved him and one daughter prayed desperately every night for his recovery, while his abandoned partner visited and helped him. The utter verbal confusion in family relations which I noted in my previous post surfaces here also. When the doctor tells the paralysed and mute editor that his wife wants to see him, his irritated voiceover declares: "She's not my wife, she's the mother of my children!" (The partner/wife is played by
Emmanuelle Seigner, better known as Mrs Roman Polanski, so it looked extra odd, to my eyes at least, that the actor playing the editor is the spitting image of Mr Polanski. It was also wonderful to see that even provincial French hospitals recruit only the most gorgeous girls as therapists!)
Winston Churchill commented in a speech in June 1941, just after Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union: "There are times when all pray". His reference was to the supposedly atheist Russian women desperately praying for the safety of their men at the front. Desperate circumstances encourage spiritual seeking. I saw the fascinating little play "Women of Lockerbie" at our local Progress Theatre recently. The little town of Lockerbie in south-west Scotland was an obscure backwater until the terrible night just before Christmas 1988 when Pan Am flight 103 exploded above it, killing 259 passengers and crew and 11 people in the town. This peaceful little town and its surrounding countryside were strewn with wreckage, bodies and bits of bodies. This very moving play was unusual in that its characters, both Scottish and American, pondered the impact of this horrible disaster on their faith and understanding of God and His presence in human affairs. Their comments were desperate questions rather than any illuminating insights, but it is not often you hear such matters aired in the modern theatre. It seemed particularly incongruous hearing it in a place like the Progress Theatre, which was founded in 1935. At that time "Progress", always a cant word, would have been synonymous with the advance of socialism and the worship of Stalin.
At the Lectio Divina group at my church, another parishioner reminded us of ancient Catholic symbolism of the scallop shell, the emblem of St James, patron of our parish. As a child, one of my teachers told us that medieval pilgrims on the long and dangerous journey to the shrine of St James at Compostela in Spain would wear such a shell. This badge was allegedly a signal to brigands and highwaymen to give them a break. A few miles north-west of Reading, there is the ancient Catholic estate of Mapledurham. Its fine house boasts at least one priest hole, used to conceal priests from the English Government agents who would have arrested and executed them. As Mapledurham is on the River Thames, many of the priests came and left by boat to minimise the risk of arrest on their journeys. If a priest was in residence at Mapledurham, three shells would be displayed in a window to discretely indicate that Mass could be heard there. And at Reading University you see this triple shell emblem everywhere as part of the University's shield; on the information leaflets, on the sides of University vehicles, on wall plaques. The University's website explains:
"The arms of the University of Reading were granted on 7 August 1896 when the newly incorporated University Extension College, Reading was still part of Oxford University. This was thirty years before it was granted a Royal charter and became a university in its own right. The simple and effective coat is one of only six armorial bearings adopted or granted by English universities before the turn of the 20th Century.
The three scallop shells on the upper part of the shield had been the arms of Reading Abbey founded in 1121 and their presence serves as a reminder that the first college was once part of the Abbey.
Since at least 1130, the scallop had been the special badge of the pilgrims to the shrine of St James the Greater at Santiago de Compostela in Spain. By the end of the 12th century it had also become the emblem of James the Apostle. Reading Abbey acquired as its principal relic, the hand of St James and a cult, complete with miracle stories, rapidly developed and eventually the scallop shells appeared on the Abbey’s coat of arms.
It is also possible that the scallop shells might allude to the arms of the local family, the Palmers. Walter Palmer, son of the co-founder of the Huntley and Palmers biscuit firm that came to Reading in the 1840s, was the first President of Reading University Extension College and the family has been and remain benefactors of the University today.
On the lower portion of the shield is the Lancaster Rose set on an engrailed cross (indented along the edge with small curves) and is derived from the arms of Christ Church Oxford, to whose initiative the Extension College owed its foundation. The arms of Christ Church were those of Cardinal Wolsey who in 1525 founded Cardinal College, later renamed as Christ Church by Henry VIII in 1546."
Reading University is hardly noteworthy as a hotbed of piety or Christian learning nowadays, but there are still very unexpected shoots of hope. Apart from the valiant Chaplaincy team, you have David Oderberg in the Philosophy Department who produces wonderful coherent arguments defending the sanctity of life against abortion and embryonic stem cell research. The British Parliament took scant regard of such arguments in their latest outrageous decisions to continue allowing abortion up to 24 weeks gestation and giving the green light to producing human/animal hybrids, but the power of reason and truth is mercifully independent of the power of venality, stupidity and fashion.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
The Need for Christian Families
St Mary's Butts is the unlikely name of one of the major streets in the centre of Reading. It is more like an elongated square than a traditional high street and has been a focus of religious and commercial life for centuries. The ancient church of St Mary dominates the east side. Parts of it date back over 1,000 years. Its welcoming vicar, Canon Brian Shenton, explains that the name has nothing to do with Our Lady's backside. The Butts were archery targets; the usage still survives in expressions such as "the butt of a joke". In the Middle Ages, when archery practice was compulsory as part of the defense of the realm, the men would come out of Sunday Mass and practice their marksmanship in the meadow in front of St Mary's. It is a very long time since there was a green meadow or archery targets in front of St Mary's. Nowadays the weapons are guns and the targets are real humans.On Friday 2nd May I was travelling on a bus towards St Mary's Butts. Most of the bus routes in town go through the Butts. But then I heard the radio controller instructing all drivers to detour round the west side of the town centre. Sure enough the bus went straight on instead of swinging right into the Butts as normal. I hopped off at the next stop and walked back round the north side of the Butts. The northern half of the Butts was screened off by police tape with officers guarding the north and south tape barriers. I asked one officer what had happened and he politely replied "I'm afraid I cannot tell you, sir". So I made a detour round the exclusion zone to the open air market where I buy my fruit and vegetables. One of the stallholders told me that there had been a fatal stabbing in the early hours. Police forensics teams in full-length white plastic suits were combing the excluded area for evidence.
The local rumour machine was of course working overtime. One of my colleagues has a friend who works at the police station, which is only 300 yards from the murder scene. His friend had told him it was a fight between two drugs gangs and that at least one shot had been fired. From the point of view of the local newspapers it could hardly have happened at a worse time. The weekly Reading Chronicle appears on Thursday morning, so would have to wait 6 days to deliver its version. The Reading Post is printed daily from Monday to Friday, so a murder on Friday would normally have to wait until Monday's edition. But Monday 5th May was a public holiday, when the Post does not appear. So the story finally ran across the Post's front page on Tuesday 6th, by which time it was pretty stale news.
But the delay meant that there was plenty of time to get quotes from all and sundry. Behind the usual smokescreen of politically corrected verbiage, you could do your own translation into English.
The 17 year old murder victim (Robert Spence) had left Ryeish Green, a local high school, in 2007. The school is due to close in 2010 after an undistinguished academic history. The head teacher made the usual futile appeal for "No more knives" and explained how the deceased had successfully studied several topics in the vocational courses offered at the school (i.e. he was not academically inclined). His 15 year old sister lamented his demise. No one was so cruel as to emphasis that her surname was different from his, a pretty good hint at a disordered family background. But the distortions of language which are routine in the British media made me even more suspicious of the accuracy of the report. Was she a full sister, a half sister, a stepsister, a foster sister, an adopted sister or something else?The ideological falsification of language which the British press now employ beggars belief. The most monstrous recent example concerned Shannon Matthews, a little girl in Yorkshire who was apparently kidnapped, but recovered alive. All the media referred to her "stepfather". Er, no, he was not. This poor little girl was only one of 7 children her mother had conceived by 5 different fathers and the "stepfather" in question was merely the latest of her mother's numerous paramours. "Stepfather" used to be a title confirmed by matrimony and characterised by a long-term stable relationship and commitment to looking after the stepchildren. No one could accuse Shannon's mother of committing matrimony at any time in her life. But she is now in prison accused of perverting the course of justice and the stepfather/paramour is facing charges of downloading child pornography. A superb article in the Christian "Touchstone" magazine argued that sexual liberation for adults inevitably leads to the sexual abuse of children and this sordid case provided yet more evidence, if more were needed, to support that argument.
But back to our equally sordid Reading killing. The police made the usual futile appeal for witnesses. Seeing that the murder happened at 4am, the only witnesses in the town centre would most likely be criminals and/or stoned on drink and/or drugs. Even by British standards of drunken debauchery, ordinary revellers would have dispersed by 2am. The police would have been conspicuous by their absence, as they are most of the time, day or night. The local hoodlums plainly had no fear of having a showdown only 300 yards from local police HQ. To compound the confusion, not all the newspaper appeals for information contained the most relevant information - the time
of the stabbing. I could not help wondering if this vital piece of information was deliberately suppressed to avoid the impression that the victim might have been the author of his own misfortune. Not a single media report has yet hinted at the drug gang circumstances reported by the rumour machine. The way the Post presented the story made him look like a lovely innocent young lad who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, 4am is certainly the wrong time for a 17 year old in any place but his own home.
Inevitably a carpet of flowers appeared in a corner of St Mary's churchyard. In the ever declining strength of real religious belief and practice, it is one unifying ritual which all can join in. Any murder or accidental death in Britain now attracts such a carpet. It was obviously not on the insane scale of Princess Diana's floral tributes. In 1997 around $40 million was squandered on a gigantic pile of flowers outside her palace in London; these were soon reduced to a foetid garbage heap. After a day or two in the spring sunshine, the plastic-wrapped bouquets in St Mary's were already wilting and fading when I checked them out. (Link to movie of flower carpet in front of St. Mary's.)
Plainly the horrible murder of Mary Ann Leneghan in May 2005 has had no long term impact on the local drug scene's viciousness and general depravity. Her disgusting torture, gang rape and killing provoked a frenzy of police and media activity which made even local drugs barons cautious for a few weeks. Martin Salter, one of our local Members of Parliament, appeared on TV to urgently warn youngsters that it was not just drugs that are dangerous -the people trafficking them are even deadlier. Mary Ann was a high school dropout and the child of divorced parents. She was hardly a sweet innocent victim either; she peddled drugs on a small scale and a local gangster believed that she had set him up for a robbery. But the media circus moves on to other priorities and sensations; the drugs gangs can bide their time and move back in when the coast is clear.The only worthwhile moral you can draw from this sad episode is the usual blindingly obvious one: the vital importance of a stable loving family background in producing happy productive human beings. Without the Christian formation and culture to sustain marriage, there is no hope for a substantial section of the British population. Without a powerful religious basis, traditional stable marriage is not viable for a large percentage of the population. So much of British culture and public policy might have been cleverly designed to destroy marriage as thoroughly as possible. The catastrophic background of Shannon Matthews is inexplicable without the cooperation of two huge factors: public subsidy for serial polygamy and polyandry via the social security system and the cultural assumption, trumpeted from the majority of media outlets, that sexual morality is the individual's own business, no matter how much misery it heaps up for other people in the form of sexual abuse, abandonment, poor academic performance and resulting vulnerability to criminal recruitment and an early squalid death.
------- A few hours later---------
Dear Stan,
Many thanks for posting and illustrating my article on our latest sordid murder. Another bizarre omission from local media reports was any mention of the dead boy's parents. Usually the first thing the reporters do is find the parent(s) and get a quote about what a lovely lad he was, etc, etc. If the parents are too prostrate with grief, an uncle or other adult relation (or at least an adult family friend) will make a statement. Yet, despite having ample time to track down the family, they quoted only the 15 year old sister (if that was her true status). Part of the problem is that categories such as "sister", "half-sister", "stepsister", etc all depend on a presumed background of stable marriage and orderly relationships. With the utter chaos in relations between the sexes, language itself is degraded into near meaninglessness. We almost need new coinages such as "para-sibling" or "para-father" to denote someone who is in some sort of semi-familial relationship.
I attach below the excellent article to which I referred in the last post. It is from the April 2002 issue of Touchstone Magazine (www.touchstonemag.com). I cannot recommend the website too highly; it has a huge back catalog of thought provoking articles which would keep you busy for months. As the articles are nearly all on issues of long-term importance, not transitory sensation, they provide a priceless resource for lectures on religious topics.Link to the article Bill refers to:
Dare We Get Real About Sex?
“Pedophilia Chic” & the Challenge to Conservatism
by Carson Holloway
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Myths About America
Dear Stan,Here is an account by Peter Hitchens of his train journey from Washington DC to Chicago. How many Americans make such a journey nowadays? But Peter is a big train fan. Not the least of his complaints about modern British governments is the massive cuts in our railway network since the 1950s. When the French President Sarkozy recently came to London, Peter wondered why he came by air when there is a superb high-speed rail link between the centres of London and Paris, which are much closer together than Chicago and Washington. When I flew to Paris in 2006, it took ages to get the Metro from Charles de Gaulle Airport into the Gare du Nord; and that is the station where the Eurostar train from London arrives.
Bill
==========================================================================
America, the UK and Misleading Myths
Peter Hitchens
As some of you may have noticed, I spent last week in the USA. I managed to do a lot of traveling by train, as the USA's passenger rail system is a lot more comprehensive and more pleasant to use than most people (including Americans) think. The journey between Washington DC and Chicago brings to mind John Keegan's remark that, while England is a garden, North America is still largely a wilderness.
You'd never get the opportunity to see this contrast if you took either the plane (which ignores the country in between) or the Interstate motorways, which sweep past and round physical features, and are bordered with regular trees, motels and restaurants. But the train plunges you into wildness, just a few miles out of the capital. After Harper's Ferry, a melodramatic and romantic place, overhung by tall cliffs, which entirely lives up to its legendary name, the tracks wind for hours through deep forest, along the upper reaches of the Potomac , wholly wild and barely inhabited, probably unaltered for thousands of years.
This is not the distant west or even the overpowering space of the prairies. It is just over the horizon from the great belt of intense human settlement that runs all the way down from Boston to Richmond, and on the way to another glowing concentration of human power and energy, the chain of industrial cities that lie along the southern edge of the Great Lakes.
Even once the mountains are over, the sense of space is always there. And I think this is another of the main differences between our two cultures, the immense amount of room in which Americans find it easier to get along with each other by staying a safe distance from each other. It was also astonishing to pass through the gigantic steelworks that still fringe the southern edge of Lake Michigan, though I think they're much diminished from how they were 20 years back. . I wonder if they'll be there at all in 20 years, given the pace of globalisation, but they give you some idea of the colossal industrial and economic power which was unleashed in the USA by the Second World War - and they reminded me of what Sheffield and Rotherham used to look like when we still had a serious steel industry.
It doesn't matter how many times I'm told that it doesn't matter that we know longer make very much ourselves. I can't help thinking that it does matter, and also that a society which doesn't have jobs for men to do, such as steelmaking, coalmining and shipbuilding, has lost something very important. We've mechanized the land, and exported most of the hard manual work to the East. Is it, can it be right for us to live at such a distance from the making of real wealth, and the growing of real food?
As for the debate in Grand Rapids which was one of the reasons for my journey, I still haven't seen it (my reflections on the event were published in the MoS on Sunday and can still be found on the website). If you take part in such a thing, you get a very misleading impression of it. But it was clear that there is ( as I knew there would be) a great gulf between American and British ways of expressing things, and between the two wholly different experiences of the early 21st century. I am told that most in the audience simply couldn't believe my description of the violence and disorder in British cities nowadays, much as I suspect many British people would be amazed by the order and safety of most of America. Both nations subsist on myths about each other which are almost completely misleading.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Multiculturalism in the UK
It was a miserable, cold, wet Easter Monday and I was driving up to Waddesdon Manor, about 40 miles north of Reading. This stately home is a little piece of France dropped into a lovely corner of the English countryside. A member of the Rothschild banking family loved French culture and decided that a French chateaux would be his ideal country house to entertain royalty, nobility and the otherwise wealthy of the late 19th century. He duly recruited a French architect and a French landscape gardener and the end result is now open to the general public - provided that you pay £6.30 ($12.60) to get into the park and another £7.00 ($14.00) to enter the house.
Is it worth it? Most definitely. In a way, it is an incredible bargain when you consider the cost of building this house and estate. The first step was cutting 30 feet off a hilltop to make a plateau large enough for the house and formal garden. Then a branch line was built from the local railway to haul in building materials. As the house is so far out in the countryside, they had to lay a water pipeline 11 miles long from the nearest large town. A gasworks was built to provide the gas for the gaslights and pretty soon a powerhouse was built to house the generators for the new electric light. Laying out the grounds consumed a staggering amount of back breaking hard slog; horses galore were brought in to haul trees from other parts of England to populate a rather barren site.
The huge park is planted with magnificent trees, scrubs, bushes and thousands upon thousands of flowers. It contains an aviary with a wide variety of exotic birds and a powerhouse which originally contained the electricity generators and now has a wall lined with the 1920s vintage electrical gear. There is a children's playground and the converted stableyard which houses a restaurant and art gallery. The house contains French furniture and tableware galore, plus an art collection by an assortment of British, Dutch and Italian masters. Admittedly you won't find the furniture at the French equivalent of J C Penny - it includes treasures such as the writing desks of King Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette, who lost their heads in the French Revolution. The china comes from the famous manufacturers at Sevres in Paris and Meissen in Dresden. The creation of china models of complex objects such as sailing ships, animals and birds represents the cutting edge of 18th century manufacturing technology.
The house itself was a state of the art dwelling, comparable to the houses recently created by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. In the late 19th century it had wonders such as electric light and an electric elevator, plus under floor central heating and indoor bathrooms with running water. Despite its technological marvels, the estate of course depended on a huge labour input, much of it from the locality. 
The house alone had 24 servants to maintain a rigorous maintenance regime which accounts for the excellent state of preservation of the contents, even vulnerable soft items such as upholstery, curtains, wall hangings and carpets. The huge park kept 60 gardeners busy. There were 5 more staff in the laundry plus more in the stables. Some servants had an international background, such as the chef who had cooked for the Czar of Russia. But you could not help but wonder what the majority of the employees thought about this alien wonder in their midst.This French style property, conceived by a member of wealthy German Jewish family and filled with treasures from half of Europe, was multiculturalism made concrete. The Rothschilds lived on a different planet to their employees, economically, mentally, culturally and certainly politically. The guests included Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill. The latter always asked for the only bedroom suite which has a balcony - most likely so that he could enjoy a smoke without trekking down to the smoking room or offending against the house's rigorous no-smoking rule (another area where it was way ahead of its time).
One of the exhibits in an upstairs room describes the Rothschilds' extensive connections with Israel and their support for its creation - a huge historic event which obviously deeply affects all our lives now and for the indefinite future. Yet there was no other obvious link with their Jewish heritage in the house's architecture or contents; any European Catholic grand house would have had some religious artifacts and quite likely a splendid private chapel.The Other Universe - Rural Life
The contrast between the lives of such people and the surrounding rural population can hardly be imagined. In Reading we have a superb little museum, The Museum of English Rural Life (www.reading.ac.uk/Instits/im). This documents the English countryside before the mass mechanization of the 20th century. The most obvious difference was the localization of the economy. Everything was grown or made within a very small radius of where it was used or consumed. The four essential raw materials were wood, straw, leather and iron. The raw iron might have to be imported from Wales or elsewhere in Britain, but the local blacksmith would transform it into horseshoes and agricultural tools. The other three essentials came directly off the local land and animals. There was no national manufacturer, much less a m
ulti-national manufacturer, of hay carts or leather buckets. You ate the food which you or your neighbours grew or could find growing wild, like berries, mushrooms and birds' eggs. You built your house with local wood, stone or brick and roofed it with local tiles or thatch. So you had a fascinating regional variation in clothing, tools, food, houses and farm vehicles - not to mention songs and customs. The Rothschilds and their guests enjoyed the advantages of ideas, materials, artefacts and cultural products from a much wider world.Multiculturalism
Driving along I was struck how my little car represented this trend conveyed to the masses. I was listening to the CD (invented by and developed by the Japanese company Sony and the Dutch company Philips) sung by Katie Melua, born in Moscow of Georgian parents and brought up in Belfast. I could insert any CD, bought for few lousy pounds, and have any musical genius on earth entertain and uplift me. I need spend nothing at all, push preset button 3 and get non-stop classical music on BBC Radio 3. To give you an example, a few years ago Radio 3 devoted two weeks to broadcasting the entire work of J S Bach. Or I could push button 4 and get non-stop news and documentaries on every conceivable topic from Radio 4.
My Seat was designed by an Italian and assembled in Barcelona with a Volkswagen chassis and engine and its multiple components supplied by God alone knows how many sub-contractors in how many countries. Where did the essential raw materials come from, how many hands and minds had touched them and transformed them? It was the same Seat I had seen in half the countries of Europe. (See www.seat.co.uk and the "Ibiza" model ).The huge variety of local cars produced by nearly every European country have largely succumbed to those provided by the multi-national American, German and Japanese firms. Obviously British dogs such as the Austin Allegro or East German jokes such as the Trabant would never survive in a world where any sane person has the ability to buy a second hand Toyota or VW. But a bizarre and fascinating variety of local designs have disappeared.
The cultural internationalism mirrors the economic; we have such extraordinary access to information, products and concepts from anywhere on earth. But along with the gain there has been a clear loss. The modern idol of "multiculturalism" is presented as if it is something new; of course the localized economies of Britain (and the rest of the world) provided the foundation for an abundant multiculturalism within one country which has 
been destroyed or diminished as mercilessly as the Trabant. An obvious example is the hundreds of English accents. If you watch Hollywood films you might believe that every English woman speaks like MRS. MINIVER (1942, played by Greer Garson or Meryl Streep's character in PLENTY (1985) . You would never guess at the staggering complexity and variety of local English dialects - never mind the numerous Welsh and Scottish variations.Most of this is due to geographical stability and isolation. Around 1980 I read of a woman in the village of Sonning Common, 4 miles north of my house, who had allegedly never been outside the village in her whole 70 years. Was this even physically possible I wondered? Well, she would have gone to the local village school until her education finished at the age of 14 - no high school or university. If she was lucky with her health she need never have been hauled off to hospital in Reading or elsewhere. She could have worked locally in a shop or on a farm or as a domestic servant. In short, she could have lived as much of the rural population lived up to 1914.
Laurie Lee's little masterpiece "Cider with Rosie", set immediately after World War One, describes the last years of a thousand year old way of life in rural Gloucestershire, 120 miles west of London. As Laurie walked 3 or 4 miles from one valley to another in Gloucestershire, he could hear the difference in accents which would have been inaudible to a Londoner. Up to World War 2 at least, people in Normandy could tell which village a person came from - a distinction which would have been lost on a Parisian. The Scripture readings at Easter echo this world when the people in Jerusalem accuse Peter of being one of Jesus' disciples - "Your accent gives you away!" Until very recently, local people were conscious of the difference between the urban Reading accent and the rural Berkshire accent of villages a few miles away.Other factors influence linguistic variety - an obvious one being occupation. An enthralling documentary on accents in Northumberland, the far North-East corner of England, described the different vocabularies of the shepherds, miners and fisherman who lived only a few miles apart, but in three different worlds. Plainly this fascinating diversity is going to be diluted or erased once these occupations disappear; the "local" people mix in jobs at the "local" supermarket (identical to 300 others) and factories and watch the same international soaps and movies created thousands of miles from their homes.
Local life still varies considerably from one country to another, but the physical environment and mental furniture have become standardized to a staggering extent. It was both fascinating and depressing to watch a young Chinese woman watching a "traditional" Irish music DVD in a video shop in Hong Kong - especially as the DVD was itself a hyper-glossy professional production remote from the joyful "craic" of an evening's music making and dancing in a small pub or village hall in rural Ireland, yet obviously going to be a multinational best seller. It was almost a metaphor for the phoniness of "multiculturalism" itself.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
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.
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