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

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
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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.

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 multi-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.

Churches of Verona: Art Galleries for God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding the Time

Milan, 6th March 2008

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

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

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

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

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

Inviting Parents to Walk on Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chuch of England

Dear Stan,

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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