Organs of Coercion

Dear Stan,

Here is a fascinating and depressing article by Melanie Phillips. It echoes concerns about organ transplantation which have been discussed on Catholic websites for the past few years, i.e. are the moribund donors really "deceased" when the transplant team move in?. As Melanie is from a traditional Jewish background, her cogent comment shows that it is not an exclusively Catholic area of moral anxiety. The immediate cause of her article was the recent proposal by the Reverend Blair's sinister successor Gordon Brown that you have to opt out of donating your organs rather than opting in. As one contributer to another website noted, it is not bad enough that the Government plunders our wallets while we are alive, it now wants to asset strip our corpses. And it could be a fantastically lucrative business, selling everything from kidneys and hearts to bone to the private medical trade.

At least Phoney Tony only squandered our money.

Bill

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January 14, 2008
Organs of Coercion
Daily Mail, 14 January 2008

The news that Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to register everyone automatically as an organ donor unless they opt out has all the hallmarks of a major spin operation.

The Sunday newspapers ran prominent stories about the proposal, which is piggy-backing on tomorrow’s government review aimed at boosting the number of organs donated for transplant. Mr. Brown himself penned an article arguing that voluntary organ donation should be replaced by an opt-out system. Similarly, the BBC had clearly been primed with information to promote the story to pride of place.

If this is supposed to assist Mr Brown’s new year campaign to restore his waning political fortunes, it’s a pretty rum way of going about it. To begin with, the idea is not even new. England’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, first proposed such an opt-out system last summer. Maybe Mr Brown thinks he can humanise his image by capitalising on the distress of people suffering or dying for want of a transplantable organ.

Undoubtedly, the impulse to give people the gift of life after one’s own death is a noble one. But if Mr Brown really imagines that he will win popular acclaim by saying that the state will whip out people’s hearts or kidneys without their consent, his advisers undoubtedly need a brain transplant.

For the implications are truly terrifying. There is no more fundamental human right than control over our own bodies and what is done to them, both in life and death.

The inescapable implication of a donor opt-out is that we no longer possess such control. The presumption instead is that the state controls our bodies and can do what it likes with them after it declares us to be dead.

If the medical profession alone were to suggest this — as its leadership most lamentably is doing — it would be alarmingly coercive. For the Government to be backing it, however, deepens coercion into something even more threatening.

Volunteering to donate your organs is one thing. Making it compulsory unless you opt out transforms an act of altruism into state oppression.

Sir Liam attempts to defuse public hostility by saying soothingly that opting out would be an ‘inalienable right’. On the contrary - being forced to opt out of automatic donation destroys our inalienable right to control what happens to us.

It is a weaselly, back-door means of trapping people into having something done to them when they are declared to be dead which may be unacceptable to them in life. Opting out requires an effort. Many will simply forget to do so. That is the cynical calculation behind the scheme. In addition, what will happen - as inevitably as night follows day —is that people will be put under great pressure not to opt out.

Patients who have done so may well be discriminated against. Chillingly, hospitals are to be rated according to the number of dead patients they ‘convert’ into donors. It is hard to imagine a more sinister incentive for the wholesale abuse of vulnerable patients.

There is, however, a yet more fundamental objection to the opt-out proposal. This is the serious doubt whether people whose organs are harvested are indeed dead.

All the evidence suggests that organs are harvested not from the dead but from the dying. In other words, at the time the organs are removed the patients are still alive.

This is because, in these cases, the criterion doctors use to decide that someone has died is the death of the brain stem. This is said to be ‘brain death’, and thus death itself.

However, it does not follow at all that the rest of the brain has also ceased to function. Yet no tests are carried out on other parts of the brain to establish whether all activity there has actually ceased or not.

As a result, people are declared dead while their heart is still beating unassisted and blood is still circulating round the body. Most of us would think such patients are not dead but very much alive.

Indeed former transplant doctors, who became so horrified by the implications of what they were doing that they abandoned the practice, say that organs for transplant are only viable if the donor is still alive — since when the body is really dead the organs become useless to anyone else, as they die too.

Brain stem death is in fact merely a convenient definition that allows surgeons to remove organs from a living body while they are still being nourished by its blood supply.

Such observations provoke outrage in transplant doctors who claim there is no basis for such ‘scaremongering’, which will cause more people to die because potential organ donors will be unreasonably frightened off. But among such doctors, their own behaviour gives the game away.

Some give ‘brain stem dead’ patients a general anaesthetic before removing their organs. But whoever heard of anaesthetising a corpse? The reason they do it is because of a sharp rise in blood pressure during the organ removal. Some doctors claim they administer the anaesthetic simply because it stops the excessive bleeding caused by this blood pressure rise. But a rise in blood pressure during any surgical procedure is an indication that the body is experiencing physical distress.

Dr David Hill, a retired anaesthetist who has long expressed deep concern about organ donation, has written that if patients react in similar fashion when their organs are being removed, the most logical conclusion is that they are not in fact dead.

In recent years, ‘brain stem death’ has been increasingly questioned as we realise how little we know about the brain. Doctors are discovering that, among patients in a persistent vegetative state whose brains are presumed to have stopped functioning, there is in fact a large amount of brain activity. The implications for what patients presumed to be ‘brain dead’ might be experiencing are simply unknowable.

More and more experts have been expressing increasing concern about brain stem death and organ donation. Three doctors wrote in a medical journal last year that declaring patients dead for the purposes of harvesting their organs was in effect a fiction, and that prospective organ donors were not being told the truth.

And a professor of philosophy and expert in medical ethics, Michael Potts, has drawn the horrifying conclusion: ‘Since the patient is not truly dead until his or her organs are removed, it is the process of organ donation itself that causes the donor’s death.’

In Britain, however, the medical establishment backs organ donation and the proposed opt-out scheme. This is because the British Medical Association and the medical royal colleges long ago lost their own ethical plot.

Renouncing the core medical precept, ‘First do no harm’, they have come to believe instead in the amoral doctrine that the end justifies the means.

As a result, from abortion, embryo research and cloning to starving and dehydrating ‘dispensable’ patients to death, respect for human life has been replaced by the belief that individual lives are merely instrumental to the creation of the happiness of the greatest number.

This way lies the most alarming infringement of human rights and a descent into tyranny.
A system the public believes embodies the highest form of altruism rests instead on deception and unlawful killing. Far from being forced into an automatic/opt- out donation system, people should finally be told the truth.

The Rocky Horror Service Book

The satirical magazine "Private Eye" has a long-running column "The Rocky Horror Service Book" which pokes endless, merciless and well-deserved mockery at modern religious follies. Many of the magazine's staff are practising Christians, so they know what they are talking about. The problem with being a satirist is that so-called "real life" is far more ludicrous than anything you could possibly dream up. So when you get religious services such as "The Ceremony of Divorce of a Married Couple" or "The Rite of Blessing of a Lesbian Creche", you are never quite sure if it is a piss-take or a factual report. In the 1960s a young British "theologian" published a book in which he argued that in order to survive Christianity would have to abandon its belief in God. Admittedly the Monty Python team started a few years later, but this book was not an early draft of a Python sketch, along the lines of the Ministry of Silly Walks or the Dead Parrot. It was allegedly serious.

As one writer commented on this book, it raised a serious question of where the boundaries of heresy lay in the Christian and more specifically the Anglican church. Was this an acceptable position for a person who could call themselves Anglican? After all, an "Anglican" bishop in good standing had recently published "Honest to God". One intelligent reviewer commented "The most immediately striking thing about Bishop Robinson is that he is an atheist". Of course the atheist question could not be honestly faced without ripping the Anglican Church into countless fragments. Instead the Anglican Church has staggered on for decades through "crisis" after "crisis" which could only be evaded by fudging the crucial questions of Authority, Doctrine and Faith. You had countless de facto schisms on the questions of the Resurrection, gay rights, women priests, scriptural authority and much more, but no de jure schism.

This total disunity was one of the basic facts of religious life which baffled any informed Catholic who witnessed the Anglican/Catholic ARCIC discussions since the 1970s. Who on earth were we talking to, whom did they represent and how could the resulting "Agreed Statements" be binding on any but the faction of Anglicans who might happen to accept them? Also what on earth were the British Catholic delegates telling the Anglicans? Were they honestly updating Rome and how could the Pope or Cardinal Ratzinger play along with this preposterous circus? Of course, the train hit the buffers with an unholy crash once Ratzinger and Co saw one "agreement" and raised piercing questions as to its ambiguities. An appalled Anglican delegate exclaimed that they had been wasting time for the past twenty years. Well, of course you have, Bishop. Any informed Catholic could have told you that 20 years earlier.....

Obviously, most theological debate has only a remote relation to how Christians live their everyday lives. But the theological confusion still percolates to the grass roots in bizarre ways. In 1990 I was invited to a wedding of two workmates. It was to be held on the south edge of Oxford. The bride's father was an Emeritus Professor at Oxford, so her family was plainly far better connected socially than mine. I parked my car in a nearby road, which made me wish I had invested in better security. It was part of the unlovely, crime-ridden public housing estates whose residents mostly worked in the local car factories. Neither the houses nor the factories feature prominently in the Oxford tourist website and brochures. I wondered how my colleagues chose to get married in such a dump.

I walked 100 yards, turned a corner and it was like Alice going through the looking glass. I found a picture postcard ancient church in a beautiful tree filled churchyard - obviously built when this area was a tiny village remote from Oxford. The bride turned up in full flowing attire, the organ played, the families beamed, the wedding proceeded.......except, of course, it was not a wedding. The blushing bride had been down the aisle once before and Anglican rules forbid the remarriage of divorcees in Church, as Prince Charles and Camilla discovered. You had to be fairly alert to notice the difference - in one crucial sentence, when the vicar said that we were witnessing the blessing of their wedding already recognised by law. The real legal business had already been done in the local registry office, but these places tend to be as appealing as the Secretary of State's premises in Michigan. You want a proper church experience to remember your special day and take pretty pictures, especially if your father has some social status.........

The problem with these faux-weddings arises with the systematic dilution of doctrine on marriage; whatever clever form of words is used, the indelible impression on people who are not religiously knowledgeable is that divorce and remarriage are perfectly OK. Admittedly, the whole Anglican church exists only because a fat guy in the 16th century wanted a divorce, so trying to adhere to traditional Christian doctrine and accommodate the sexual frailties of 21st century England is more difficult than squaring the circle. It is like an old sweater unravelling - once the threads are pulled, they keep disintegrating.

The tensions within the Catholic community in England are not much different. You can see some of the problems that the clergy face in the weddings and funerals I have attended in recent years. One unforgettable fiasco at the end of 2005 highlighted some of their difficulties of conscience. The music group in which I sing had been invited to perform at this wedding. We diligently prepared and rehearsed, and turned up way ahead of time at St James. Father Dominic waited for the bride at the front door of the church in the freezing cold of New Years Eve....and waited and waited. Finally she appeared half an hour late and the ceremony got under way. Come communion time, not a single person came up for communion. Neither the bride nor the groom received communion. We were up in the choir loft, so by the time we realised what was happening it was too late to race downstairs and receive communion to spare Father's embarrassment. Why on earth bother to get married in church at all if it meant so little to you?

As a postscript a few group members waited at the church for ages afterwards to collect our long-agreed fee. A wedding guest had to go into the town centre to get the cash from an ATM. If we had not got it that day, we would plainly never have got it. It's not that we're mercenary - we sing for love, but we agreed that we want musical contributions to be valued and did not want to undermine professional musicians who need a serious fee to survive. Finally, two of the group went back to their car parked in the mall across the road. With all the delays, they found they had overstayed the welcome extended to St James parishioners and were hit with a £30 fine.

As one priest contributer to "Faith" magazine noted many years ago, the clergy who take doctrine seriously face a horrible quandary in presiding at the marriage of many couples. Can we in good conscience preside over a "Catholic" marriage when we are morally certain that, in five years time, a Catholic marriage tribunal will agree to its annulment? This couple looked a prime example of this principle.

A wedding at St James where we sang in December 2007 highlighted another uncomfortable fact - apparent compromising on premarital chastity. I knew little about the couple until the service got under way and Fr Dominic was inserting words that at one time would have appeared only in the Rocky Horror Service Book. Along with the traditional prayer that they be blessed with children, he invoked blessings on their two year old son and prayed for the strengthening of their relationship already begun. Plainly the clergy have to welcome repentent sinners and people seeking to regularise their marital status, but I could not help feeling queasy at the whole tone of the event. As with the Oxford "wedding", (where again the happy couple had cohabited for years before the service) the public witness to a casual observer was that premarital sex and producing children out of wedlock was no big deal. But, for the umpteenth time, I was glad that I am not a priest because I cannot think of a way in which I would have firmly upheld Church teaching without alienating the couple, and thus their child and future children.

With the struggle to maintain churches accumulated over decades of capital investment, in years of much more fervent religious observance than today, the Catholic clergy in Britain have got multiple overlapping and conflicting doctrinal and financial pressures to handle. The only reason we still have reasonably full churches is because of the massive recent East European immigration. And the Poles, Lithuanians and Slovaks are by and large not yet high earners so their financial contribution is not yet substantial. As with any business, no one wants to upset customers. Yet Jesus was seeking disciples, not satisfied consumers, and some people walked away from His "hard saying". He did not seek to entice them back and increase market share by diluting His message.

Funerals are an even worse quagmire for the clergy, with multiple opportunities to offend people at a very traumatic time. The brilliant funeral director Barry Albin-Dyer gives some grim and hilarious examples in his book "Don't Drop the Coffin!". One of my colleagues went to his grandfather's funeral service and was enraged beyond measure when the vicar got his grandfather's name wrong on several occasions. Admittedly, Anglican clergy have an extra hard burden to carry in England because any British person is entitled to an Anglican burial. Also, they do duty service at places like crematoria chapels where they conduct funerals almost on a production line basis and have practically no chance to meet the families beforehand. An extreme case for one Anglican vicar was the day when a funeral procession entered the chapel at the crematorium and the funeral director sidled up to him and whispered "Suicide". So you have 30 seconds to compose a comforting sermon on the theme of suicide for a congregation of total strangers.....

But conducting funerals for people who never darkened a church door is routine for clergymen. It is hardly surprising that the implicit message given at any number of funerals I have attended -- Catholic, Anglican, Baptist or United Reform -- is of Universal Salvation. The questions of repentence, forgiveness and damnation are mentioned fleetingly, if at all. The wise and humane old Roman advice to "Speak no ill of the dead" gets inflated into an evasion of basic questions about life and death and eternal life. One Anglican vicar in London wrote a wickedly funny piece on the gruesome banality of some funerals where the only touch of real religion is when someone's cellphone rings unintentionally and the ringtone theme is "Jesu Joy of Man's Desire".

Again, it is tasteless to mention money at a time like this, but like marriages, funerals are a source of income for clergy who are on very low stipends by UK and USA standards and you can hardly deny the insidious influence of the need to keep the customers happy. Funerals and weddings are also a possible occasion of grace for people who otherwise have no contact with religion. I know of one man who started going to Mass again after his father's funeral. Plainly our clergy deserve more encouragement, support and training in presenting the truths of religion and Catholic morality clearly but humanely, because the potential harvest is there. But it is not going to be reaped by soft words and evasion.

Old and New Labour - An Apology

Dear Stan,

Sorry for another update so soon, but I regret that I have been insufficiently rude to the Reverend Blair. It is admittedly hard work keeping track of his unbridled venality, as the information changes by the day. On Thursday 10th January the London "Evening Standard" ran a front page story that he was going to be paid a million dollars a year for services to J P Morgan. Just a minute, isn't he going to be a Middle East peace envoy, public speaker for hire, and possibly President of the European Union as well? How is he going to fit it all in? Well, the JPM job will be only part-time, the article explained. A article promptly appeared on the "Guardian" website explaining that a million a year for the Vicar of St Albion's wise counsel was good value from JPM's point of view. The Guardian often reads like the New Labour court circular, but this reeked higher than usual.

Come Friday 11th January, the "Telegraph" ran an update explaining that the JPM salary was actually $4 million a year for two days a month. This redefines "part-time", which most ordinary mortals understand as two or three days a week. Of course JPM are making truckloads of money from the reconstruction of Iraq - a situation which the Vicar played a supporting role in creating.

It is a sad reflection on the power of inflation that $4 million bucks doesn't buy you much of a politician any more. Many years ago, two Conservative Members of Parliament received £1,000 ($2,000) each to ask questions in the House of Commons on behalf of their benefactor. Neither resigned or was forced to resign once the news broke. At the time you had to pay around £2,000 for a top class hooker in London, so you could buy two MPs for the price of a whore. At that rate, you could have bought a working majority in Parliament for $640,000, but mercifully I don't think the majority were that corrupt. Now you have to cough up $4 million for an utterly discredited creature like Blair. As one correspondent in today's "Telegraph" noted "JP Morgan omitted to follow the most elementary employment procedures - it failed to take up references from Tony Blair's previous employers: the people of the United Kingdom".

Even worse, I had assumed that, once Blair left office, he was at least off the public payroll. But, no, he still gets $180,000 a year from the taxpayers for an ex-PM's office expenses.

The best comment ever on political corruption is of course from "A Man for all Seasons", when Sir Richard Rich gives the crucial perjured evidence which convicts Sir Thomas More and is rewarded by being made Lord Lieutenant of Wales. Sir (later Saint) Thomas comments: "Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world.....But for Wales!"

Old and New Labour

Tony Blair is the exemplar of the "New Labour" politician, the successor to the founders of the British Labour political movement in the early 20th century and the welfare state in the late 1940s. I had an unexpected meeting with the ghost of the "Old Labour" party while walking along Addington Road in December.

This road lies a mile south of the town centre and, for much of its half-mile length, does not look particularly up market or appealing. With its undistinguished mixture of house styles from the 19th to the late 20th century, it could be any of a thousand unremarkable roads in British towns and cities. It is named after Lord Addington, the only Prime Minister to come from Reading. He is best remembered for a mocking rhyme comparing him to the great William Pitt:

"Pitt is to Addington
As London is to Paddington".

The only fact that makes Addington Road triply desirable is its location; close to the town centre, close to Reading University AND having both the top-ranking Reading School and the Royal Berkshire Hospital bordering on it. Near the west end, there used to be a long-neglected piece of overgrown ground which was once a playing field for Kendrick School, the best girls' school in town and one of the top 10 girls schools in the country. What sports they played on this sloping land I do not know. But nature abhors a vacuum, especially when there is so little new housing in a very desirable location, and finally builders bought the land and erected a mixture of houses and apartments. They thus created the only noteworthy feature in Addington Road - a curving terrace of 14 town houses, designed to evoke an 18th century Bath terrace. The 18th century originals in Bath, 70 miles west of Reading, sell for £3 to 4 million ($6-8 million). So the Reading imitations look like all-time bargains at only £500,000 ($1 million) each, especially as they provide 21st century features such as integral garages in the basement. You could even have a lift installed to provide disabled access, though at four stories high they must be the least likely homes ever touted as "disabled accessible".

Many housing developments in Reading provide some public amenity as part of the deal with the council giving them planning permission. So one apartment block next to the terrace was reserved for "essential workers" such as nurses. The Royal Berkshire Hospital is only a hundred yards away, but not many nurses or junior doctors can afford half a million pounds for accommodation. In addition, the semi circle of land in front of the concave terrace has been landscaped into the smallest park in town, and possibly the smallest in the whole country.

On entering it, I found a sign declaring it named after Lorenzo Quelch (1862-1937), a founder of the Labour Party in Reading in 1918 after a lifetime of working in various socialist movements. One of them was named the National Socialist Party - unexpectedly funny, in view of the later political career of Mr Hitler. But there have been so many parties, tendencies, breakaway groups, factions and sects in left-wing British politics in the last 200 years that it must be difficult finding a fresh and distinctive name for each new formation. I knew of one extreme left-wing "party" in Reading which consisted of one family of four people. Lorenzo used to live in Addington Road, which was one reason for naming a local landmark in his honour.

I could not help but marvel at the numerous overlapping ironies in naming this tiny patch of land after Lorenzo. What would he, who spent so much of his life fighting the "hydra-headed monster of capitalism" (aka Huntley and Palmer's Biscuits, the biggest employer in town), have made of a public park provided in a complex deal with a multi-million pound property company? What did he have in common with the smooth talking highly educated spokesmen of the local Labour party who named it after him? Lorenzo was born into desperate poverty. One of his childhood memories was trudging through the snow to pawn his mother's wedding ring. Lorenzo was a Sunday School teacher as well as a tireless politician. Quite a contrast to the privately educated "Phoney" Tony Blair with his eyewatering income and his association with a millionaire hard core pornographer. It was a sad reminder of how the most ardent dreams and noble desires of pioneers get twisted and soured over time.

But a few hundred yards to the east of this luxury development I was reminded of a different way in which the socialist dream had curdled in a probably predictable way. I used to work for the Department of Social Security in Reading and in 1976 I had to visit a house in Addington Road. Under the one roof there were two "families" claiming social security. Nowadays, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll, "family" means whatever you want it to mean. But this menage was an eyeopener to someone as young and naive as me. Upstairs, a man, his partner and their two children constituted one "family". Downstairs a woman and her four children constituted the second "family".

What made it unforgettable (and required my presence to write a report) was the fact that the man upstairs was the estranged husband of the downstairs woman. He had abandoned her to move in with his partner and sire two children, while his wife and four children lived on social security. But he had lost his job and thus the means to support a second household. Either he was a silver tongued SOB or his wife was excessively charitable, but she agreed to help him out by allowing him plus new family to return to the original family house and live on social security.

With the information I gleaned from my visit, the adjudicators back at the office agreed that was OK to pay them as two separate "households", even though they shared one none too large house which had not been subdivided into apartments. Even in 1976, in the early days of the sexual revolution, this "family" set up was obviously exceptional and there were few precedents to guide civil servants in making decisions. And, of course, any decision made could itself serve as a precedent for later decisions....

What is obvious is that this sort of behaviour is possible only for the wealthy or the poor who effectively have unlimited access to the funds extorted from the luckless taxpayer. At that time few of the general public were fully aware of what they were being forced to underwrite and I am sure most would have objected vigorously to funding such arrangements, if they had been allowed any influence in the matter. Yet it was an inevitable consequence of the Social Security legislation passed in the 1940s (under Lorenzo Quelch's Labour Party successors) and its later legal enhancements. It seemed so humane and essential for any modern civilised society - we look after the jobless and especially their children.

But now some sections of the Labour movement find themselves in effect condoning even more immoral behaviour. An extreme, though illuminating, recent example concerned a "family" where the three daughters aged 11, 13 and 15 had all conceived children. Needless to say, all three daughters had themselves been conceived without benefit of matrimony - we are now a whole generation on from my Addington Road "families". The grandmother, her three daughters and their children were living on around £25,000 ($50,000) per annum in combined Social Security and housing benefits. Also, needless to say, none of the "fathers" of these babies were making any contribution, nor were they ever likely to make any.

Roy Hattersley, one of the surviving relics of "Old Labour", makes a lucrative living as a media pundit and in one newspaper column he protested at the media vilification of this family and implied that the real tragedy was the poverty in which this family found themselves and about which the middle classes cared nothing. Plainly £25,000 a year was wholly inadequate. But the family's small house is obviously inadequate and they will doubtless soon be allocated a larger public house. What level of Social Security would relieve Roy's tender conscience without encouraging even more dim witted young women to produce babies on a production line basis? I hope he knows a guy who is expert at squaring circles. But people feel reluctant to suggest reforms which would take resources away from children in one parent families - "compassion" for poor children is a combined ace, king and queen card for the Social Security lobby. Some in the Labour Party, especially the religiously inspired such as Frank Field, see clearly the horrible morass that compassionate instincts have lead so many into and suggested reforms, but they are still very much in the minority.

Tony Blair a Catholic?

Fr. Dennis Brown sends me, Stan, a Zenit.org post:

Holy See Welcomes Blair's Decision to Convert
VATICAN CITY, DEC. 23, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Tony Blair's decision to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church has been welcomed "with respect" by the Holy See, according to a Vatican spokesman. “This is "good news that we welcome with respect…Catholics are glad to welcome into their community those who, through a serious and reflective journey, convert to Catholicism."

I wrote my Catholic friend Bill in the UK

Bill

I recall 4 years ago some of us thought both Bush and Blair would convert upon their leaving office. So, were you invited to the reception?

Stan

Bill wrote back:

Dear Stan,

No, I was not invited to the reception. With my opinions on Phoney Tony (or Tony B. Liar), the security guys would never have let me within a hundred yards of the ceremony. What has staggered both many Catholics and numerous secular commentators was the contrast between Blair's voting record on numerous key legislative issues (e.g. abortion, stem cell research, gay "marriage") where he proved himself to be one of the the most anti-Catholic British politicians since Oliver Cromwell, and his professed Christianity. How on earth could he possibly be accepted into the Church without public and unequivocal penitance for his past public outrages against Catholic morality?

But then the Blair contradictions are endless. When he sucked up to the loathsome hard-core pornographer Richard Desmond, who had just bought two major newspapers (admittedly, an action guaranteed to get most British politicians groveling at your feet) , one scathing columnist noted "the Reverend Blair was caught with a hard-core magazine concealed inside his Bible". When he came to power in 1997 in the wake of a string of corruption scandals which had dogged the outgoing Conservative government, he promised to be "whiter than white". Needless to say, the new Labour regime has been plagued by one accusation of corruption after another, culminating in Phoney Tony being the first British Prime Minister to be questioned by the police while still in office. Sadly, instead of serving a suitably enormous prison sentence, he is free to tour the world as a peace envoy (the most unlikely candidate since Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize) and earn vast sums of money on speaking engagements and memoir sales.

I have pasted in below a very good article by Fraser Nelson from "The Spectator" of 28 Nov 2007. He gives a more temperate and balanced account of the Blair conversion issues than I would! Some of the quotations are very revealing, especially the one from the priest on working-class Irish in the church. As my late parents were both working-class Irish, I had steam coming out of my ears at his comments. The working-class Irish (and now the new working-class Poles, Slovaks and Lithuanians) have been the backbone of the Church in England for generations. If the bishops and other well connected clergy are so desperate for social acceptance in the higher reaches of the British establishment, it is plainly time that we had a new set of bishops.

I also loved one comment from a "Daily Telegraph" reader on Blair's first confession -that he would need a confessional with an en-suite bathroom...

Blair may be about to convert, but will that make him a Catholic? (by Fraser Nelson) from "The Spectator" of 28 Nov 2007

Tony Blair’s coming conversion to the Catholic faith will not be welcomed by all Catholics. There are many in the Vatican, and the Catholic church in this country, who wonder how a politician with his voting record can be admitted to the church.

‘My First Confession’ would be a great title for Tony Blair’s memoirs. At any rate, though the book may be years away, Tony Blair will soon confess his sins to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and later (no one is sure, but the Vatican has heard it will be after Christmas) Mr Blair will be received into the Roman Catholic Church. And in true Blair style, his decision to ‘Pope’ is creating a political storm.

In the robustly secular world of Westminster, few care what Mr Blair does with his Sundays. But Mr Blair’s conversion is a hot and divisive topic among priests and ordinary Christians in this country — and even in the Vatican itself. Churchgoers who wrote to their MPs in protest against the former prime minister’s various policy initiatives, from embryo research to laws on homosexual adoption, have good reason to be puzzled. Has Blair recanted? If he has, shouldn’t he say so publicly before he is received? Or has he decided not so much that he will go to Rome, but that Rome will come to him?

Many are remarkably keen to speak on the subject — but few on the record. ‘I cannot be identified,’ says one senior Vatican source. ‘The amount of good I am able to do here depends on it.’ There are pressing issues here, however. Some fear that Blair’s conversion has no deep theological basis, and that the rules are being bent in a most spectacular fashion to accommodate him. Others fear that Blair is no more than a secular liberal with broadly Christian — but not obviously Catholic — beliefs.

If Mr Blair were not a public figure, none of this would matter much; at any rate there would be none of the sort of anger that is now sweeping the pews. It is Mr Blair’s prominence and his outspoken religiosity that cause the problem. The former prime minister has spoken with obvious feeling about what he believes and how he fuses his politics with his creed. Alastair Campbell was not comfortable with this, declaring four years ago that ‘we don’t do God’. But Mr Blair most emphatically does.

Although Anglican, Mr Blair has always attended Mass with his wife, a convent-educated Catholic. He has done so, he says, to keep the family together on Sunday. He has described himself as an ‘ecumenical Christian’, which appears to mean that he confers on himself the right to attend any service he chooses. In 1996 the late Cardinal Hume wrote asking him to stop taking communion at St Joan of Arc, a Catholic church in Islington. He reluctantly agreed, but wrote in reply, ‘I wonder what Jesus would have made of it.’
He might also have wondered what the Anglican and Catholic martyrs would have made of it. Much as it may baffle Blair, people once died rather than deny — or affirm — Catholic Eucharistic teaching; and few practising Anglicans and Catholics would today dream of gatecrashing each other’s communion queues. Yet Mr Blair had come to his own, very unique conclusions about religion, and felt confident enough to lecture a Cardinal on Eucharistic protocol.

In Downing Street, Mr Blair’s faith was seen as a driving factor in his life — but few saw his beliefs as Catholic. ‘If you look at not just his voting record, but his legislative record, he has fought the Church for years,’ says one senior official who worked for him at No. 10. ‘That is why I cannot see how he can enter the Church now. Converts cannot cherry-pick which parts of the faith they agree with. It’s easier for cradle Catholics to dissent, but converts have to sign up to the whole agenda. Perhaps he has changed his mind. I just don’t know.’

To critics within the Church, Mr Blair was — as one priest puts it — ‘the most anti-Catholic Prime Minister of modern times’. Others, especially Evangelicals, go further and describe his policies as broadly anti-Christian. He has legalised homosexual civil unions and gay adoptions. He has championed stem-cell research — and with a fervour that contrasts starkly with his friend George Bush’s opposition to such research. He voted against lowering the abortion limit from 26 weeks to the present 24. His credentials are those of the perfect secular liberal. All this makes it baffling that he should now choose to join the Church that has so often attacked New Labour’s legislative programme. His friend Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has been an outspoken critic, but Mr Blair has, apparently, been unmoved.

Joining the Catholic Church is not for the doctrinally fainthearted. The convert must first make confession of his serious sins. Next comes the Rite of Reception which includes the declaration: ‘I believe and profess all that the Holy Catholic Church believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God.’ Ann Widdecombe says she had struggled with this sentence before being able to convert herself. ‘So either Tony Blair will perjure himself on a massive scale, or he has genuinely repented. But we can’t send a message that we accept people just because they used to be the prime minister.’

Other Catholics go further. ‘St Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus would pale into insignificance by comparison,’ says John Smeaton, director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, who has a dossier on Mr Blair’s voting record. ‘We need to hear a full repudiation from him. Without one, having Blair as a Catholic is like having a vegetarian in a meat-eating club. It simply does not make sense.’

But might there be more leeway in the conversion process than Mr Blair’s critics suggest? Some would say that there is. The so-called Tablet Catholics — named after the distinguished liberal Catholic weekly — would argue the case for plurality. Cherie Blair puts it like this: ‘The Church isn’t just about the Vatican. It’s about all of us.’ This is the Catholicism of Hans Kung, a Swiss theologian who professes loyalty to Rome but rejects its teaching on celibacy and women priests. That he has been a house guest at 10 Downing Street provides another clue to the Blairs’ thinking.

Mrs Blair made her position explicit in an article two years ago in which she confessed to having ‘doubts’ about some of the Church’s teachings. ‘But I have been taught that you should stay and try to change things. It’s like the Labour party in the 1980s. I wasn’t happy with the way it was going, so I tried to help change it from within. Luckily, we won that battle.’ For all the breathtaking presumptuousness, one cannot fault her ambition. Today: Westminster. Tomorrow: Rome.

But one cannot join the Church as a liberal Catholic. There is only one kind of Catholicism, and its teaching is laid out in the Catechism. No doubt Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor will have discussed the Catechism with Mr Blair; certainly his spiritual adviser will have done. ‘If Cormac is for Blair coming into the Church, then there is nothing anyone down here can say about it,’ says a senior cleric in Rome.

Many priests I spoke to suspect that Mr Blair’s charm may have been impossible for the Cardinal to resist. ‘The Catholic Church in England has been working-class Irish for yonks and we’ve only become socially acceptable in the last 30 years,’ says one London priest. ‘It can be very flattering when you’re courted by the establishment. If Mr Blair came knocking on my door, instead of the usual hobgoblins, I’d be flattered. I can understand if Cormac has been.’

Yet it is just not possible to believe that the Cardinal would allow himself to be seduced into allowing an unsuitable candidate to become a Catholic. But why, ask liberal Catholics, hold Mr Blair to a standard of doctrinal orthodoxy that many of today’s faithful would fail? Mr Blair’s supporters believe opposition to his joining the Church is confined to a handful of Tories and ultra-conservative clerics.

‘Those objecting to Tony’s conversion are modern-day Pharisees,’ says one former aide. ‘How many Catholics can genuinely say they agree with every single one of the Church’s teachings? Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ Stephen Pound, a Catholic Labour MP, takes a similar view. ‘Perhaps Tony isn’t perfect. But there has only ever been one person on this earth who was. If he wants to join the one, true and indivisible Church then we should celebrate the fact.’

In the Vatican Mr Blair’s conversion has been expected for some time. When he met the Pope last June he brought as a present a picture of Cardinal Newman, the most famous Anglican convert. The meeting consisted of pleasantries, as is the custom on these occasions. An altogether tougher encounter had occurred earlier when Mr Blair met Cardinal Bertone, the papal secretary of state, who laid out the Church’s objections to Mr Blair’s legislation. But there is no Papal blackball on his conversion.

There is concern in Rome, however, over the liberal direction of the Catholic Church in this country. According to a senior Vatican source: ‘The situation in England, from mass attendance to vocations, is as bad as anywhere.’ But things in the US and Germany are bad too. That is why the Pope has decided that there are three appointments that will define what is expected to be a relatively short papacy: new cardinals in New York, Munich and Westminster. All three incumbents have reached the mandatory retirement age.

But finding a successor can be a slow process even under fast-moving Popes. ‘The Holy Father is a gentle man, he works very slowly, to the frustration of some,’ I am told. Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Birmingham, has long been the frontrunner for Westminster. ‘But he is the Gordon Brown of the Church,’ says once source close to the Cardinal. ‘He thought the job should have been his last time, and he’s been gunning for it ever since.’ The Vatican suspects the Cardinal’s preferred choice is Arthur Roche, Bishop of Leeds.
Both may be in for a disappointment. I am told the Pope is sceptical about choosing anyone from England’s ‘magic circle’ of metropolitan bishops and is actively considering monastic candidates to succeed Cardinal Murphy- O’Connor — just as Basil Hume was plucked from the monastic seclusion of Ampleforth Abbey in 1976. Those already in Church hierarchy, it is feared, are liberals.

But the Cardinal himself is certainly no patsy. Catholic MPs were this week surprised to receive an invitation to a private soirée to discuss the coming ‘parliamentary agenda’ — the first time a ‘Catholic whip’ has been attempted. The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales is clearly not going to stop his campaign against the anti-Christian policies of this government, or of any other. Tony Blair’s conversion may be popular at Westminster Cathedral — but his secular liberalism will not find any sympathisers there. When it comes to his first confession, he will have to follow his conscience — and listen carefully to the advice of his confessor.

Hong Kong, Progress, and Atheism

The day before Christmas, I received a Christmas package from Bill with a beautiful calendar from Hong Kong, and some British Humor magazines. Always a treat. I thanked him for the package, and he wrote back:

Dear Stan,

Glad to hear that you received the package OK. The Hong Kong calendar gives you some idea of the unbelievable vitality and economic success of this tiny enclave. Even though it was returned to Beijing rule in 1997, it is still a Special Administrative Region; the nominally "Communist" regime is smart enough to pay only lip service to Marxist and Maoist pieties and does not want to inhibit this goose from laying as many golden eggs as possible. I found the following web page while following up comments on Theodore Dalrymple's brilliant article on currently fashionable atheists. I was fascinated to see someone else supporting my speculation on the reasons for the phenomenal success of Hong Kong and Singapore. A major Chinese economist noted how civilized the Chinese in Hong Kong were and attributed it to Christian influence. Certainly I felt much safer on the streets of Kowloon and Singapore than on the post-Christian streets of Britain.

One amusing detail I found in Singapore which I had not mentioned before. On Orchard Road, the land of mega-malls, I found a huge and crowded branch of Borders. It was practically identical to the Borders on Orchard Lake Road in Farmington Hills. The layout, interior design and book stock looked as if they had been prescribed in detail from the corporate HQ in Ann Arbor. The only way you could tell you were in Asia was the inclusion of some Asian magazines among the US and UK titles in the magazine racks. Also I think the coffee shop was run by a different franchisee.

Bill

Reading Reading

Dear Stan,

Cafe Scientifique is a new venture by the University of Reading as part of its public education outreach. For years the University has run public lectures in the evening in the Palmer Building, in the same auditorium where Reading Film Theatre shows its arthouse movies. These lectures have covered a wide variety of fascinating topics and been delivered with an equally wide variety of skill by the eminent speakers. Just because you are the top expert in the world on Italy under Mussolini does not guarantee that you'll deliver a scintillating lecture on the subject, as I found out last March. As the lectures are all free, it is ungracious to complain and impossible to demand your money back.

Unlike the public lectures, Cafe Scientifique is held off campus - well, 200 yards off campus in one of the bars at the Queen's Head pub in Christchurch Road. This has the advantage of being less formal than the main public lectures where the lecturer is out front at a traditional lectern and the audience is in banked rows of cinema-style seats. At the pub we were all packed in close to the speakers. The disadvantage was the limited seating for the crowd who squeezed in to listen to two speakers on stem cell research. One of them was Dr Che Connon, a researcher in stem cell research specialising in using adult stem cells for treating eyes damaged by disease or accidents, such as having corrosive liquids thrown in the face. The other was David Oderberg, originally from Australia, now Professor of Philosophy at Reading. He has lectured and written extensively on the moral implications of bioethical research.

The evening held two stunning surprises. The first was Professor Oderberg's ethical approach. For much of his talk he sounded as if he was channelling Pope John Paul 2 on the sanctity of human life, destruction of embryos and so on. I had never heard of the guy before that evening although he lives only a quarter of a mile from Reading Prison and hence St James Church. See the attached interview with Prof Oderberg for a secular philosopher's views on some of the key aspects of morality. No wonder I had never heard of him; his opinions would not be welcome in the BBC or most British TV or newspapers.

The second surprise came in the shape of an American doctor who stood up in the question and answer session to declare himself a supporter of our old friend Jack Kevorkian and a long term campaigner in the USA for abortion rights. In a somewhat incoherent challenge to Professor Oderberg, he seemed to imply that universities were for 'intellectual' pursuits and lectures based on beliefs were somehow off limits in an ethical debate. I may be doing him an injustice, but he was almost a caricature of the moral liberationist so evident in much of the US and British media and parts of academia.

The Queens Head may sound like a bizarre venue for an educational initiative, but then Christchurch Road compresses the extremes of the British education system into a very small space. At its east end, less than 200 yards from the pub, you find the huge green campus of the University of Reading. Less than two hundred yards to the west of the pub there used to be Reading Alternative School. This sounds like a chic and radical school, with an imaginative curriculum and innovative teaching methods. Er, not quite. You went to Reading Alternative School only when there was no alternative for you. Your totally disruptive, violent or depraved behaviour meant that even the worst schools in town had washed their hands of you, but the luckless Local Education Authority still had a legal obligation to 'educate' you until the age of 16. A friend taught at this school for a few months and was lucky to escape uninjured when a pupil threw a pair of scissors at her. She is a really lovely and compassionate person and explained the horrendous backgrounds of many pupils; parental neglect and abandonment, physical, emotional and sexual abuse, drink and drug abuse, mental illness. The name was proof that local British government, like the national government, has no shortage of bullshit merchants.

I use the past tense because Reading Alternative School no longer exists. I walked past some weeks ago and Phoenix College had taken its place. My cynical sister suggested that the name was inspired by the 'students' torching the earlier school, but the buildings looked much the same. Plainly the bullshit merchants had paid a return visit. They must have trained the staff well because shortly afterwards an article appeared in the local paper. Reading Alternative School might as well have been on Pluto for all the press coverage it received. Every other school in town had newspaper articles describing its academic achievements, sporting successes, drama productions, musical concerts, fundraising events, etc. No parent would ever boast about their child going to Reading Alternative School. Now at last an article described a charity fundraising event at the Phoenix College. For the benefit of bemused local citizens,who had not a clue where this 'college' was or what it taught, a staff member explained that the pupils 'had many things going on in their lives'. It was like 'La Vie en rose' covering Edith Piaf's World War 2 career.

Walk less than 300 yards west along Christchurch Road from Phoenix College and you come to the junior department of Abbey School. You go to the Abbey School if you are female and your parents can afford £8,000 ($16,000+) a year in fees. Sally Taylor, who presents the local news on BBC South Today, went to Abbey School. In fact an astonishing number of TV presenters went to Abbey School. The Chief Vetinary Officer in Britain also appeared on TV quite a lot during the recent foot and mouth disease panic.....and she went to Abbey School. The pupils at Phoenix College probably have a better chance of flying to the moon than going to Oxford or becoming TV presenters, even when the school leaving age is raised to 18 as the Government plans. But the Local Education Authority will have the pleasure of educating them and keeping their teachers alive for even longer.

William Murphy