God in Strange Places

I keep meeting God in some very strange places. As I noted in a recent post He was recently on the front cover of that very secular political weekly, the "New Statesman". And on a BBC documentary on the plight of the Church of England. And in the spectacular blockbuster "Knowing", which proved yet again that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If it did not explicitly mention God, it shamelessly cribbed many of His famous special effects, such as the Ascension and Fire from Heaven.

Now He appeared on page 33 of "The Times" colour magazine on 9th May. A new religious order, The Community of Our Lady of Walsingham (www.walsinghamcommunity.org), provided material for a 5 page article with several photographs. The article started by describing the latest recruit who presently flies all over Europe as an air hostess and is due to enter the convent in September 2009. In fact the number of pages is more than this order's current number of members - who are Sister Camilla, the order's founder and webmistress, and Sister Gabriella.

Thus the air hostess will increase membership by 50% when she joins. Just about all parish prayer groups are larger than this miniature order. Why on earth would a major paper take any notice of it? Well, there is the rarity value of its plans to become a mixed-sex religious community - the first in England since the Reformation. There is certainly space for extra recruits. Several men are interested in the development of the Order and may make the plunge soon, once accommodation arrangements are sorted out.

It sounded like a rare piece of good news for religious life in Britain, where convents have been closing the length and breadth of the land. As I drive to work along Bath Road in Reading, I pass the Monastery. This is a very upmarket apartment development which was a Carmelite convent up to 1998. Then the aging and dwindling community dispersed to other Carmels and the site was sold for secular housing. Three miles to the north, the convent in Southview Avenue, which housed the nuns who taught me as a small child, was similarly sold a few years ago.

The new order is based in Brentwood, about 40 miles north-east of London. It was founded only in 2004. Looking at the reasons quoted for its foundation, I couldn't avoid the feeling that it owed as much to the consumer mentality as to traditional religious inspiration. Page 70 of the same magazine reviewed a new Japanese restaurant in central London. Of course, London has restaurants for just about every cuisine on earth. If you didn't like that restaurant, there are plenty of other Japanese eateries to feed you. And if you don't like Japanese food at all, you can choose from hundreds of other food styles from Portugal to the Phillipines. Pages 40 to 53 described several styles of the latest men's and women's clothing - the tiniest sample of what you can find in London's shops large and small.

Page 58 onwards contained the storyboards for the new commercial for Chanel No 5 perfume, the sequel to Chanel's 2004 commercial starring Nicole Kidman, which was reportedly the most expensive commercial ever made. This new commercial is being made by the director of "Amelie" (plus 250 technicians), stars Audrey Tautou, and will probably cost more than most European feature films. According to the article, the director "made the most of its (Chanel's) agreement not to be tightfisted about the production costs". You might think this is a seriously insane agreement to make with any creative filmmaker, but then someone once told me that perfume has a higher profit margin than any commodity except heroin.

This glossy and gloriously materialistic magazine seemed like a totally incongruous setting for an article on the religious life. But the founder explained that "I wanted the poverty of the Franciscans, the zeal of truth of the Dominicans and the liturgy of the Benedictines". I couldn't help feeling that this implicitly insulted all three existing orders on 2 out of 3 counts. I am most familiar with the Benedictines, because of my visits to Douai Abbey which is a Benedictine foundation. Certainly their liturgy is first-rate. But are they lacking in the Truth and Poverty departments??

It seemed faintly bizarre to fashion a religious order which fitted you exactly, much as I visited the tailor in Hong Kong to get a suit of the exact material, style and size to fit me precisely. Even the writer of the article wondered if it would be better to support an existing order than create yet another brand. And surely if you found an order precisely to your specification it must reduce the chances of finding like-minded members, just as my tailored suit would fit very few other people.

Sister Camilla also explained that she wanted a community which would be both "of the world" and yet rooted in time for silence and prayer. Er....don't numerous existing orders do just that, underpinning their work as teachers/nurses/whatever with a serious prayer life?

It is not the smallest religious order I have come across. On my trip to Medjugorge in 1996 I met a very well educated English "nun" who claimed to be the only one of her order, with a distinctive blue habit. Admittedly Medjugorge tends to attract people who are madder than a sackful of cut snakes, to quote a great Australian phrase. She wasn't the craziest person I met that week. There was the nurse from Glasgow who described the visions she saw when she stared at the sun. But this one-sister order ran the nurse a close second, especially when she described a stained glass window in the Medjugorge church which contained a nun with a habit exactly like hers. No, it definitely looked nothing like yours, Sister.

I can only wish the new foundation well and hope fervently that the mixed sex aspect does not result in a horrible car crash somewhere down the road, with the resulting publicity all over the pages of newspapers even less Godly than "The Times".

Great Daily Articles on Morality, Culture & Notre Dame

Stan,

See great article on 1st May 2009 post in http://www.firstthings.com/. Once Lacy Dodd, a student at Notre Dame, found herself pregnant she quickly discovered what sort of guy her boyfriend, another ND student, was. He was all in favour of a quick abortion. As she says, "pro-choice" doesn't include the choice to keep your baby. Of course, like most articles, it leaves out far more than it includes. Like, does her daughter have any kind of relationship with her Dad? What sort of relationship could you have with a parent who wanted to abort you?

Bill

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Bill, do I have to subscribe? It looks as if I can't get to the articles other wise. Stan

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You don't need to subscribe to First Things to read most of the excellent material. There is a DAILY ARTICLE LINK on the top page and it is just a matter of going to the bottom of that article and clicking on the "Read More" link. [On the U.S. site, the articles for May are strung all together. Just scroll through them. -- SW]. This leads you to the previous daily articles in date order.....then you scroll down to the abortion article of 1st May.

The article for 8th May is particularly pertinent as it echoes the theme of one of my posts "Because it is wrong!" The author of the 8th May article reminds us of the centrality of moral principle in deciding the rightness or wrongness of an action. Thus it is expedient for the state to bug a confessional to obtain a murder conviction, or to torture someone to obtain anti-terrorist intelligence, or to conduct stem cell research to obtain a medical cure.....but all these actions violate a higher moral principle.

As well as the daily articles, you can click on the Archive tab at the top to get a mountain of back numbers of First Things. Enough to keep you reading for years. It is only the two most recent issues which are protected to encourage you to subscribe....

Latin Mass for One

Is the Latin Mass less worthy of reverence than “Hamlet”?

Tuesday after Easter. I have a spare hour, so why not check out the daily Latin Mass at St William of York? It was at 1120am on that day only, which you might think was an odd time for any Mass. Not pre-work or post-work or lunchtime; it might attract only retired people or homemakers or the staff and students at the adjacent university who can make their own time. In fact, even these had other things to do and I found myself alone in the nave.

It was the first time I had ever been the sole member of the congregation at any Mass in any language. It certainly encourages concentration when you are the only one to make the responses AND in a foreign tongue. Fortunately most of the Mass is either silent or said by the priest, so my mispronunciations were not too plentiful, despite a sore throat. Unfortunately the long gaps of silent prayer made it extra hard to keep my location in the Mass booklet. With no clear visual or audible cues to guide me I was flicking back and forth in the booklet to see where my hoarse voice might next be needed. Suddenly the priest would proclaim: “Dominus vobiscum!” and my rusty childhood reflexes kicked in with “Et cum spiritu tuo.” Phew! Back on track at top of page 23.….

Even more unnerving is making sure I am kneeling, standing or seated at the right points. Normally you follow the herd movements up and down. Mercifully there are directions in the margins of the Mass booklet.

In some ways it was a wonderful nostalgia trip, with the glorious prayers ripped from the liturgy after Vatican 2 now coming up fresh as new paint. What could be more wonderfully new every day than the opening lines: “I will go up to the altar of God, the God who gives joy to my youth”? What bunch of destructive eejits thought that they would attract young people by editing out prayers like that? The Good Centurion, quoted for 2,000 years at every Mass just before Communion, was similarly evicted. “Lord, I am not worthy that thou should enter under my roof….” After all, in the 1960s atmosphere of universal peace and love as prescribed by Ho Chi Minh, a saintly imperialist military guy did not quite fit the picture. Now the God who gives joy to every one’s youth and the virtuous commander were back in daily prayers.

Come Communion, I advance to the altar rail. The altar rail has not been eliminated every where - I knelt at one in St Stephen’s Cathedral in Budapest in 2004. But at St William they have to improvise for Latin Mass - the strip of kneelers/bookrests normally used for the front row of seats is pushed forward to form a temporary altar barrier. You might think that a congregation of one would be difficult to miss, especially when he is my size, two rows from the front and the only voice responding, albeit croakily and shakily. Do I receive the host? Er, no, the priest carries on in silent prayer, back to me, apparently unaware of my bulky kneeling presence.

I retreat bemused to my seat, Mass concludes, followed by several post-Mass prayers which I had not heard in years, including the old favourite to St Michael the Archangel. Then, as the priest is finished and I am on the point of leaving, he asks apologetically if I wanted Communion. Well, yes… I quickly regret this as it involves a rewind to the pre-Communion prayers, distribution of the host (to me alone) and then a repeat of the post-Communion prayers.

Would I do it again? Definitely. Would I switch to it entirely as an alternative to the English rite? No. The sense of being an onlooker rather than a participant in the Mass was too palpable and you can see why even some Popes wrote about Catholic congregations being silent spectators. But the current marginalization of the Latin liturgy is both a monstrous injustice and a serious deprivation for much of the Catholic population in all countries. Only a minority of Catholics in England can easily get to a Latin Mass and savour a rich slice of Catholic history and prayer and I am sure that is the case in most parts of the world. We are incredibly lucky in Reading to have such easy access.

Yet you can get Latin Mass at any concert hall in the world, but as an artistic exercise, not a profound act of worship. No one dares to insist that a mass by Beethoven or Bruckner must be translated into fourth rate English before it is inflicted on the ignorant concert goers. Given the price of concert tickets in most countries, the hall managers would probably have an instant riot on their hands. Similarly for all the shorter prayers and devotional pieces set to incomparable music such as Mozart’s “Ave verum corpus”. Latin is plenty good enough for such masterpieces. Most Shakespeare producers and directors are happy with the English of 1600 without going in for a simplifying translation into the English of 2009. Is the Latin Mass less worthy of reverence than “Hamlet”?

Thoughts After Easter

Guildford, 30 miles south-east of Reading, is a town I have driven past on numerous occasions, but never visited. I finally got round to it on Easter Monday. What has it got to offer? Well, there is an enormous cathedral, started in 1936 and finished in 1961 after countless interruptions due to WW2 and shortage of funds. By the time it was finished it was only 2 years to go to the "Honest to God" debacle and the on-going crisis of Anglicanism which continues to this day. So maybe it is the one of the last Anglican cathedrals to be built in England, or anywhere else. Like the John Keble church in North London, which I mentioned in a recent post, it has a very distinctive (or unfortunate) 1930s architecture which some have applauded and some have compared to a power station.

The Christian heritage of Guildford overflows in every corner. There is the huge "Friary" shopping mall. In the middle ages there was a friary on the site, which was destroyed under that thieving, murdering, adulterous scoundrel Henry VIII. (Though for the Day: Was he even worse than Tony B Liar? Probably not as Tony is responsible for far more deaths in Iraq and even Henry, whatever his countless shortcomings, was not keen on sodomy or abortion. And both had the brass neck to set themselves up as heads of religious foundations.). Then there was a large house called The Friary. Then, in the 19th century, there was the Friary Brewery. Now commercial change has brought a mall whose interior can hardly be distinguished from a hundred others the length and breadth of Britain.

Further up the picturesque High Street, past the coffee shops and mobile phone retailers, there are the almhouses, founded by a local man who went on to be Archbishop of Canterbury. They are still used 400 years later to house the elderly and still are called a "hospital", in the archaic sense of a place of refuge for the elderly rather than a medical centre. A short distance away there is a very prominent statue of this Archbishop.


Across the road from the almhouses there is Holy Trinity church. The signs outside advertised the multitude of Holy Week activities, including a dramatic reenactment of the Passion around the streets of Guildford on Good Friday. It was performed by a local theatrical group, founded by Peter Hutley, a fervent Catholic convert. They also produce a colossal outdoor play of the Life of Christ in beautiful countryside at nearby Wintershall. It is the nearest we have to the Oberammergau Passion Play. But Oberrammergau is performed only every ten years, while Wintershall happens every summer. See
Recreating the Life of Christ.

Back in Reading it had been a similarly crowded schedule at the much smaller church of St William of York. But it was not the long-time worshippers who were doing all the work. The Latin Mass Society used the church nearly every day for the two weeks before Easter. On some days they were there all day for multiple acts of worship or activities, such as a family picnic on the day before Palm Sunday. Services such "Tenebrae" which I had seen only on obscure websites suddenly appeared on the parish noticeboard for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Suddenly we mainstream Catholics using the English rite were starting to feel marginalised in our own church.

We ought to feel grateful. For years St William has not had a priest of its own and has been served by the parish priest at St James. But the poor man is horribly over-stretched with multiple duties such as the prison chaplaincy and the diocesan marriage tribunal. If the diocese was going to close any churches, we knew that St William had to be the first for the chop in the Reading area. Its special selling point was its closeness to the University campus, but there is another, larger church, Our Lady of Peace, barely 100 yards from the north-east gate of the campus. St Williams, with only two Masses per week, was grossly underused and was barely more than a dispensable "chapel of ease", despite its devoted congregation.

Now there is at least one Latin Mass every day and at least three Masses on Sunday, plus any number of other services and social activities. There is a fourth Sunday Mass if the Hungarian priest is in town. And the LMS are buying a property for their priest in the area so they are settling in seriously for the long term. And they are advertising for a confessional structure to fit into the "crying room" at the rear of the church. How much longer before they re-convert the sanctuary to the pre-Vatican 2 style, purely for Mass with the priest facing the altar, his back to the congregation? If they are visibly the most active users of the premises, it would be hard to refuse them.

We pray for re-birth and renewal of the Church, but sometimes our prayers are answered in very unexpected ways. The future belongs to the fervent and, to judge from the length of their Holy Week services, the LMS worshippers are fervent. One of our congregation who checked out their Good Friday service in 2008 left well before the end because of the heroic length. She should be grateful we have not adopted the Russian Orthodox style of standing throughout services. One English traveler to old Russia recorded the rigours of Holy Week in a pewless Moscow church: "May God grant us His special help to get through this week! As for the Muscovites, their feet must be made of iron".

Beneath the Waves

Gosport, on the south coast of England, has been a Navy town for centuries. Driving into town I passed signs pointing to the "Institute of Naval Medicine". Not many towns have one of those. What is so special about "Naval Medicine" as opposed to ordinary doctoring? Well, you have all the problems associated with deep sea diving. And the risks of radiation contamination from the reactor in your nuclear submarine. See Institute of Naval Medicine.

Which brings us to the reason for my visit - the Submarine Museum. Not many towns have one of these either and what an enthralling place it is.

In fact Gosport is far more interesting than you might suspect. The main roads and most of the side roads look like the dreariest and most nondescript sections of Reading or any other small to medium sized English town.

But then I passed Holy Trinity Church. The exterior is eye catching enough, with its free standing column of a clock tower separate from the main church.

But the interior is wonderful, with a light filled nave and beautiful decoration.



In front there is a tree in full glorious blossom and to the right a most handsome Georgian house which used to be the vicarage. To judge from the expensive motors outside, this very desirable residence now has more affluent tenants. And immediately to the right of this house was a gate with the baffling name board: "Bastion No 1". Effectively it is a public park. Obviously it is not the only "military" park in the world - think of Battery Park in New York or Fort Canning Park in Singapore. But at least they put "Park" in the title, while the Gosport local council were content to leave this little patch of green with its stark military name, reminding the public of all the Bastions which protected Gosport.

A hundred yards behind the church are two huge slabs of apartments: ugly as mortal sin, erected by developers with the imagination of a mentally retarded flea. It made this little 1696 oasis all the more amazing and unexpected. You might expect it in a historic town in Germany or Italy, but not in functional, military Gosport. To add to the enjoyment, the parish website explains how the ministers of this Anglican church have been of the High Church persuasion for 150 years and spread "catholic" (with a small "c") teaching in the town. See http://www.holytrinitygosport.co.uk/welcome

This little gem is only a few minutes drive from the Submarine Museum. This institution is divided between an ultra-modern building, a very shabby entrance area in the course of reconstruction, various tacky wooden/semipermanent structures and an actual submarine "HMS Alliance".



This stands clear of the water on massive supports and the completely exposed expanse of its hull makes the rusty bits only too clear. But the interior lived up to my expectations of a traditional diesel-electric submarine: horrendously cramped, minimal comfort for the crew. There were levers, wires, piping, switches, dials, consoles and mysterious bits of machinery everywhere, low hanging objects to hurt the tall like me and irregular floors to trip up the unwary.

Our elderly guide had served on "Alliance" and was full of submariner stories. He ran soundtracks to demonstrate the overwhelming noise from the diesel engines and the bowel-loosening sound of a surface warship approaching and dropping depth charges. Obviously they couldn't reproduce the violent shaking of the submarine or the smell of terror as the crew braced for the attack and possibly the last seconds of their lives. Of course they couldn't reproduce all the other smells of submarine life: the cooking, diesel oil, toilets, body odours (no washing, laundry or shaving for weeks on end). He commented that when a submariner took the bus home after a tour of duty he was guaranteed a seat well to himself.......

Outside "HMS Alliance" on the quayside there is a memorial to all the Royal Navy submarines which have been lost. It is poignantly and appropriately headed "Resurgam" (I will rise again). This was also the name of an early submarine. One of the few I recognised was "HMS Thetis". It is a sign of how secret and uncelebrated much of our submarine warfare was. Thetis was not even lost in battle; she sank ignominiously in Liverpool Bay, close to shore, in 1939 before the outbreak of war. A guy opened the interior cap of a torpedo tube not realising that the other end was also open. 99 men died. George Orwell, writing during WW2, described how upset he had been at the highly publicised sinking of Thetis and the desperate attempts to save the crew. He had hardly been able to eat for days at the thought of all those young men suffocating in the cold and darkness of their steel tomb. Now he noted how every one rejoiced when a German U-boat was sunk and fifty fine young men died similarly.



Inside "HMS Alliance" there was a quotation from a WW2 British admiral - "In submarines there is no room for error. You are either alive or dead." Too true. There is limited buoyancy, limited space to evacuate a flooded or burning area, limited oxygen, limited battery power, limited space for spare parts or tools to fix any failures.......

Yet there was space for a most unexpected item. The new museum building had a miniature organ on display. In submarines access space is desperately tight. Every opening is a point of weakness in the pressure hull and so they are kept small. The 21" torpedos could just about slide down through the hatch into the tube area. Similarly this tiny organ could just about fit through the hatch. Until the 1980s such an instrument was standard issue in submarines for religious services. I don't know how often they were used, but the fact that they were permitted in such a cramped vessel speaks volumes about earlier generations' priorities.

Other aspects of British military culture were revealed in the interviews with crew members on a modern nuclear submarine. Obviously the meals are much better nowadays. The "Alliance" veteran described the green bread, tinned food and how they had two choices for dinner - "You ate it or you didn't eat it". With a nuclear reactor you have effectively limitless power to provide refrigeration, water and clean air, so the chefs can be more adventurous and stale food smells are dispersed by the air conditioning. Also an officer was asked about the privileges of rank beneath the waves. "Well, we have a steward to look after us...." Holy Cow. We are taking servants into battle? I as almost as stunned many years ago when a TV documentary showed a steward serving coffee to officers relaxing in the plush wardroom of "HMS Illustrious". But "Illustrious" is an aircraft carrier, almost as big as a liner.

Also there were several signs that even such a functional and serious museum is not immune to the charms of showbiz. The torpedo section obviously contained a long exhibition on Robert Whitehead, the British inventor of the torpedo. A Royal Navy Admiral H.J May commented in 1906: "But for Whitehead, the submarine would remain an interesting toy, and little more". Whitehead married an Austrian lady. One of their granddaughters, a very lovely girl, was invited to the launching of a new Austrian submarine in 1912. She caught the eye of its handsome and courageous commander, one Captain von Trapp. They married and had seven children, but she tragically died of scarlet fever, leaving the youngsters motherless. For the rest of the story, see the"Sound of Music". One display room celebrated the submarine in literature and movies. Obviously Jules Vernes' "20,000 leagues under the sea" and its 1954 movie version held pride of place, but Sean Connery's features adorned the poster for "Red October" and other undersea films showed our unending fascination with this alien and desperately dangerous environment.

Tony Preaches to the Pope

Dear Stan,

Here is a story ("Daily Telegraph@, 8th April 2009) which practically redefines chutzpah. Our former Prime Minister thinks that the Pope should change the Church's teaching on sodomy. How did our Cardinal Cormac ever let this snake into the Church? Mercifully Cormac is retiring soon and being replaced by Vincent Nichols (of Birmingham archdiocese). I like the comment below Damian's article from an American reader who says that he reads the "Daily Telegraph" because the US papers are still besotted with Obama - not for much longer I suspect.....

Tony Blair wants the Pope to rethink his line on homosexuality.
What about Blair's line on abortion?

Prophets of Doom - Cagey Catholic Monarchs

The recent blockbuster "Knowing" rang a distant bell in my memory. In an early scene the Nicholas Cage character's astronomical colleague is stunned. How can Nicholas believe the theory that a pageful of apparently random numbers, written in 1959, contains prophecies of a string of disasters from 1959 to 2009? The incredulous colleague correctly points out that such pattern-seeking theories are a dime a dozen.

The only occasion I met such a theorist in person was in 1978. I was working for the Department of Social Security in Reading and visited a guy who had paid no National Insurance (Social Security tax) for a few years. He lived in a little cottage in an idyllic corner of South Oxfordshire about ten miles north of Reading. He had given up his regular job and was devoting his whole life to deciphering a pattern of words in the Bible. I wish that I had kept detailed notes of his explanation, because I can't remember any significant points of his hypothesis or what great secret he was hoping to unveil to mankind. As I have heard nothing of him since, I assume that his labours were futile.

He was living off his savings - very frugally, as he had a wife and two children, who allegedly fully supported him. I wrote my report and the case was filed away as he was doing nothing illegal; if you do no paid work, you pay no National Insurance.

Plainly the Cage character has an equally sympathetic employer, as he seems to be able to absent himself from his official duties at M.I.T. whenever the spirit moves him. But maybe M.I.T is more spiritual than you might suspect from its sternly rationalist title. In this movie, the first view you enjoy of its campus is centred on a most imposing domed building that could well be a temple or basilica.

Admittedly the spiritual themes in "Knowing" are pursued with as much subtlety as an air raid. The dazzling ascension into the spaceship accompanied by angelic figures and a torrent of light, the apocalyptic destruction of mankind (in effect by fire from Heaven), the final images of two innocent humans in a glorious landscape dominated by a magnificent tree......haven't we been here before? In the End is the Beginning, to be sure. But the fact that the scriptwriters pressed the traditional spiritual buttons shows some marginal lip service to the core beliefs of most Americans. Of course they also pushed the filmmaker's favourite emotional button (Children in Peril) with the zeal of a lab rat hitting the Food switch.

All the above special effects were exceedingly bloody impressive on a $50 million budget, a pittance by Hollywood blockbuster standards. It also paid for a spectacular air disaster, a forest fire and the most insanely over-the-top train wreck I have seen since "Speed". (Gentlemen, subway trains, in New York, or anywhere else, just don't go fast enough to create such mayhem.) I couldn't complain about the bang for my bucks, even in a typically over-priced British multiplex. It certainly pays to shoot movies in Australia rather than in a Los Angeles studio. But were there any wider lessons we might draw?

One obvious lesson is that all the dollars on the planet can't guarantee a half-decent screenplay. You might object that asking for any internal coherence or intelligent story development in a major movie is an inherently silly request. You would have a better chance of finding the truth in a British tabloid. But the very title "Knowing" and the early part of the film, where logical thought is needed to decipher the code, might raise some hope of a moderately thought provoking fable.

Sadly, "Knowing" is so appallingly written and realised that the numerous logical contradictions in the screenplay are simply evaded in a parade of stunning special effects, and any intelligent story development is crushed by a series of creepy or baffling incidents. Why the presumably super-intelligent extraterrestrials spent their time hanging around the hero's home like a bunch of dim witted kiddy fiddlers instead of evacuating more of the human race or working out a way to deflect the Sun's wrath and save us all......well, that's a mystery known only to God and (maybe) the scriptwriters. If you believe the prophecy written down by the little girl in 1959, these aliens had at least 50 years to evacuate or save us and they did precisely nothing. Or they might have made the message less cryptic in the first place and allowed us a chance to save ourselves.

Of course prophecy is an inherently contradictory business. If you accurately predict the future and someone believes you and tries to change it, the prophecy is falsified. The only satisfactory story of prophecy that I am aware of is, of course, Macbeth. The witches' prophecies are entirely "true"; they are sufficiently accurate to lure Macbeth into mortal sin. Yet they are also sufficiently misleading to deny him a moment's genuine benefit or peace of soul and eventually lead him to utter spiritual and physical destruction. And the story is structured so that the anti-hero progresses through his prophesied future with a predestined inevitability.

400 years after Shakespeare, it would be nice to think that highly paid filmmakers would be prepared to face the implicit contradictions of prophecy in an interesting way, but no such luck. Perhaps we should just be grateful for any sympathetic treatment of religious attitudes in a major movie. It was particular refreshing to see the hero's quietly decent pastor father portrayed in a positive light instead as a nutcase, bigot or charlatan.

I have speculated in the past that popular culture provides ways of preparing the public for radical changes in scientific perception. The most obvious recent example is "Sex and the City". The completely irresponsible behaviour of four promiscuous women in New York, the AIDS capital of the planet, was a pretty merciless mockery of the horseshit fed to the public for years by the AIDS industry. Similarly the role played by the Sun's fluctuations in the heating of the earth in "Knowing" looks like an equally savage mockery of the "CO2 = Global Warming" yarn we are still being sold in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.

Is "Knowing" another straw in the wind, signalling abandonment of crassly rational explanations and looking instead for salvation from the Heavens? There have been a few signs recently, in the most unexpected places. On 3rd April, I saw the word "GOD" in enormous letters on a magazine cover in W H Smiths newsagents, not normally a hotbed of piety. No, it was not on the cover of "The Tablet" or "The Church Times". The "New Statesman", normally a left wing political mag appealing to a small number of people who still take left wing thought seriously, was running a special issue on religion.

Given the contributers, I took it about as seriously as you could take "Knowing" on cosmology or prophecy. Here were all the Usual (gruesome) Suspects. Christopher Hitchens (but not his religious brother Peter), Richard Dawkins, Polly Toynbee..... A few of the more reliably on-message theists, such as A. N. Wilson, were wheeled on. Since writing "The Death of God" (around 1999), Wilson claims to have found God alive again.

The Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, was permitted a typically intelligent three column inches...about the same as our ever-asinine George Monbiot, the noisiest promoter of the religion of global warming. Good to see that Prophets of Doom are still given a hearing. But given the 3 pages devoted to Hitchens and Dawkins combined, you knew where the NS editor's sympathies lay. No danger of the good Rabbi or any competent Catholic theologian being given three pages. Yet the fact remains that religion is a prime factor in human affairs and cannot be ignored even by a handful of eminent atheists in major Western cities.

Religious problems just keep breaking out, like an itch the secularists cannot quite reach to scratch properly. The bruhaha over the recent idiotic Parliamentary Bill allowing the heir to the Throne to marry a Catholic is a prime example. I pointed out that such permission could mean that the Monarch after next might be a Catholic head of a Protestant Church of England. Not according to the fine print on the front of "The Daily Telegraph" (who usually get their religious facts straight). Any spouse of the heir would have to agree that their children be brought up as Protestants. So the heir could marry a Catholic as long as she was a bad Catholic. What if the spouse was a Jew (bearing in mind that Jewish identity is transmitted via the mother).....or a Muslim....or a devout Hindu?? Er, better to drop the whole dumb affair and keep on offending only Catholics.

The recent appointment of our new Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, attracted plenty of space in the secular press. The discussion on his merits was conducted in grossly secular terms, but the fact that they thought this item deserved the column inches is another sign that the Death of God has been greatly exaggerated.

And as I write, BBC Radio 4 is transmitting a documentary discussing the politics and legal status of the Church of England. Should it continue to be the recognised State Church, with the hereditary monarch as its anointed head and seats reserved for Anglican bishops in the House of Lords? How can the Church in England be boxed in by foreign Anglican Churches (who comprise the majority of Anglicans and inconveniently keep insisting on traditional Christian teachings) AND adapt to the sexual practices of 21st century Britain (including the practices of its monarch)? One of the contributers blamed Richard Dawkins for stirring the pot and raising the anomalies of the C of E's position. Perhaps we should be grateful to the troublesome professor for raising the public profile of religion.

Another contributer on the program pointed out another aspect of the "Catholic Monarch" debate. If the Monarch became Catholic, he would be anointed at his Coronation by an "Archbishop" whose priestly consecration was "null and void" according to the Pope's encyclical "Apostolicae Curae" (On the Nullity of Anglican Orders) of 1896. Holy Cow, we are getting the Latin title of an encyclical issued 113 years ago quoted over the secular BBC radio waves.

The future remains unknown, but it seems that the prophets of the death of religion still have a very long and futile wait ahead of them.