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The world lit up in wonder

The Tablet - Fri, May 19th 2023

In The Tablet this week:

The Conservative Party is frequently said by its own supporters to be in an existential crisis, searching for its soul. Patrick Hudson was at the National Conservative Conference in Westminster yesterday, where he heard Fr Benedict Kiely, an Ordinariate priest and noted advocate of Christians in the Middle East, declare that British conservatism was “spiritless”. In our leader this week, we look beneath the mess of the Tory government’s immigration policy to the absence of anything that might be passed off as a coherent vision or philosophy. In order to deport refugees to Rwanda or anywhere else they have first to be deprived of their rights – their right to have their claim to asylum considered, their right to appeal, and their right not to be deprived of their liberty without due process and a fair trial. The Government’s implicit assumption is that those rights are theirs to give or take away as it pleases. Has it stopped believing in the existence of an objective moral order? Is its only moral compass self-interest, the desire to hold on to power for its own sake? The Conservative Party may have no coherent philosophy and may be riven with division and indiscipline and Rishi Sunak’s government is only just clinging to office – yet as Julia Langdon points out in a roller coaster tour d’horizon of the UK’s political scene there may also be trouble ahead for the leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer. Let's see.

In the seventh in our series of conversion stories by young Catholics, Lauren Spohn, an American studying in Oxford, describes in a lyrical piece how as she started to see history as a great romantic quest, she found herself drawn to the Catholic Church. The farmer and financier Ben Goldsmith tells Suzi Feay how the devastation of the loss of his fifteen-year-old daughter transformed his relationship with his family and with the natural world. D.J. Taylor proposes that George Orwell’s anti-Catholicism co-existed with a surprisingly lively interest in religion: a recently discovered letter sent by Orwell reveals a meeting in 1932 with the English Jesuit priest C.C. Martindale (“much nicer than his writings”). The brief but grisly Irish civil war drew to a close 100 years ago. After hovering on the fence during the war of independence (scandalising, amongst others, respectable English Catholic opinion as expressed in this paper’s editorials at the time), when green on green violence broke out the Irish bishops moved decisively to give their support to the Free State government. As Oliver Rafferty reminds us, the cosy relationship between Church and state was ultimately to prove something of a disaster for both. 

 

 

There are seven pages of briefings and news stories from our journalists, editors and correspondents in the print edition, giving readers an unrivalled overview of what is happening in the Church in Britain, Ireland and across the world. Updates and new stories are added to our website several times a day. Madoc Cairns writes that a special message from the Pope has been sent to all those participating in the celebration of the 650th anniversary of Julian of Norwich receiving her Revelations of Divine Love. On the letters pages, Canon Rob Esdaile encourages the bishops of England and Wales to ask Pope Francis to declare Julian a Doctor of the Church. Elsewhere on the letters pages, Mary Varley and Gary Leece express their disappointment with what Archbishop Malcolm McMahon was permitted to share of his investigation into the events that led to the resignation of Robert Byrne as the bishop of Hexham and Newcastle. “The bland references to Bishop Byrne’s ‘errors of judgement’ simply raise the question as to how and on what basis he was appointed in the first place,” Leece writes. In our second leader, we suggest that the failure to address this issue opens the bigger question of what rights Catholics have to be consulted over the appointment of their bishops. At present, the answer is – virtually none.

Elsewhere on the home news pages, Madoc Cairns writes that Paul McAleenan, the lead bishop on migration issues, has backed Justin Welby’s excoriating intervention in the House of Lords against the government’s migration bill. Patrick Hudson reports that Ukrainian Catholic churches in Salford and Oldham have been given Grade II-listed status. And Sarah Mac Donald writes that Donald McKeown, the Bishop of Derry, has said that both church leaders and politicians must speak more honestly about the past. 

Pope Francis added 21 Coptic Christians murdered in 2015 to the Catholic Church’s martyrology during last week’s visit to Rome by the head of the Coptic Church, Pope Tawadros II, writes Patrick Hudson. In Belarus, Jonathan Luxmoore reports that opposition activists have appealed to Pope Francis after President Lukashenko announced plans to ban Corpus Christi processions. The French Church has begun issuing a new celebret – the document issued by a bishop that certifies that the holder is a priest in good standing – in the form of an ID card, writes Tom Heneghan. In Germany, Christa Pongratz-Lippitt reports that two dioceses are forging ahead with plans to include lay people in church governance, despite Vatican disapproval. Poland’s bishops insist that they will not take sides in the forthcoming elections, writes Jonathan Luxmoore, and Christopher Lamb writes that it has emerged who the late Cardinal Pell favoured as the successor to Pope Francis: Cardinal Péter Erdö, the Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest. It's unclear whether the Australian cardinal's endorsement will help or hamper Cardinal Erdö's prospects.

In View from Rome, Christopher Lamb speculates on what might come from President Zelenskiy’s meeting with Pope Francis and reports on his visit to the Hotel Ergife, where delegates to the general assembly of Caritas Internationalis elected new leaders to replace the senior executives dramatically sacked last November. A Japanese archbishop is to be the new President, and Alistair Dutton, currently the chief executive of Sciaf, was chosen as the new secretary-general. 

Christopher Bray is left in despair by two books analysing the flaws of liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf’s case for making the repairs necessary to save it and Krishnan Nayar’s argument in favour of dismantling what is left of it. Fiona Sampson delights in Andrew Motion’s intimate and human memoir; Patrick Hudson speeds through three studies that help make sense of the war in Ukraine, including Luke Harding’s reporting from the front line; and Morag MacInnes admires Michael Magee’s amazingly assured first novel. On the Arts pages, Mark Lawson relishes how the racial diversification of theatre has led to a revival of faith-based plays in London, to the shock of the white liberal elite. A three-hour documentary into the reclusive J.D. Salinger left Lucy Lethbridge little the wiser; and Anna Moore is disturbed by an eerie and affecting Japanese film about a radical – and entirely plausible – way of dealing with an ageing population. 

Joanna Moorhead wrote recently about her recent trip to Assisi with Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, which is currently hosting a wonderful exhibition on St Francis; in her column she confesses that it was St Clare – “the yin to Francis’ yang” – who really caught her imagination. Our wine writer N. O’Phile absolves port from responsibility for causing gout and traces the first use of the word “gout” to a thirteenth-century Dominican chaplain to the Bishop of Chichester. And finally, Jonathan Tulloch, fully recovered after a spell in hospital, celebrates his first walk in the woods with his wife after his illness: “The air was so clear and fresh that it felt like I was swimming”. 

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