Catholicism

Thursday

Damian Thompson

No one in the Bible has been as elaborately misrepresented as Mary Magdalene

How would the real Mary Magdalene have reacted to her posthumous reputation? Not very kindly, one suspects. Our only historical source, the New Testament, does not even hint that she was a prostitute, and she’s unlikely to have been placated by Christians telling her: ‘It’s OK, we think you were a reformed whore.’ No one in the Bible has been so elaborately misrepresented. In addition to not being an ex-prostitute, Mary of Magdala was not Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who anoints the feet of Jesus with ‘about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume’ and then wipes it up with her hair. Nor was

Thursday

Alan Judd

The Tudor sleuth who's cracked the secret of suspense

Some reviewers are slick and quick. Rapid readers, they remember everything, take no notes, quote at will. I’m the plodding sort, making more notes than I can ever use and underlining so many quotes that, if I put them all in, it would constitute a republication of the book. But I’ve not done this with Lamentation, the sixth novel in C.J. Sansom’s Tudor crime series featuring his credible and likeable hero, the lawyer Matthew Shardlake. I intended to proceed as normal, but so engrossing is the tale that I didn’t pause long enough to take a note. Even when judged by the high standards of the earlier Shardlake novels, this

Tuesday

Ed West

Border controls are a basic human right - is it un-Christian to oppose mass immigration?

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_21_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Damian Thompson joins Fraser Nelson to discuss the Pope v the Vatican.” startat=928] Listen [/audioplayer] Is it sinful to be not so keen on the whole immigration thing? I suppose Justin Welby thinks so, according to his recent comments. ‘We have to be careful and you can’t over-burden the community, you have to be realistic about that but also we must never – part of the Christian, at the heart of Christian teaching about the human being is all human beings are of absolutely equal and infinite value and the language we use must reflect the value of the human being, and not treat immigration as just a

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

After the Pope's Synod-on-family fiasco, let's judge Catholicism on Catholic terms

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_2_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Luke Coppen and Cristina Odone join Freddy Gray to discuss divorced Catholics.” startat=1053] Listen [/audioplayer] The Church’s extraordinary Synod on the family hasn’t gone down terribly well with secular pundits. It’s been billed as a failure on the BBC, which declared that gay Catholic groups are ‘disappointed’ with the inability of the Synod to make progress towards acknowledging gay relationships. Other groups are similarly disappointed by the Synod’s refusal to admit divorced and remarried people to communion. As Damian Thompson observes, Pope Francis probably has no-one but himself to blame, in that he allowed so much of the pre-Synod discussion to focus on these contentious areas. All the

Monday

Tom Gallagher

The Scottish Church showed little statesmanship or common sense during the referendum

A few hours after the final result of the Scottish referendum was announced, I visited the cemetery at Cille Bharra on the Outer Hebridean island of Barra. It’s the burial place of Sir Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972). I wondered what this versatile character, World War I British spymaster, novelist, and Catholic convert whom the students at Glasgow university elected as their rector in 1931, would have made of the result. He believed that the Catholic faith had greatly influenced the nations’s long-term personality and felt that its soul had shrivelled with the retreat of that faith to remote outposts such as Barra, where he had his home in the 1930s. An

Thursday

Sam Leith

Soldier, poet, lover, spy: just the man to translate Proust

Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff’s Englishing of Proust — widely and immediately agreed to be one of the greatest literary translations of all time — very nearly didn’t happen. Scott Moncrieff only suggested the project to his publisher after they rejected a collection of satirical squibs in verse (sample: ‘Sir Philip Sassoon is the Member for Hythe;/ He is opulent, generous, swarthy and lithe.’). Like any good hack, he had another suggestion up his sleeve: there was this character Proust just starting to be published — making a bit of noise in France. Constable didn’t immediately see the value: ‘They replied that they did not see much use in publishing a

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

A day of four popes: John Paul II and John XXIII canonised

To have one pope canonise another is remarkable; to have two popes canonise two popes (well, one was looking on but you see what I mean) is a marvel. These events are always a bit mindblowing by sheer dint of numbers – BBC reports estimated that a million people were present – but in terms of spectacle, the day of four popes is something else. I was in St Peter’s Square myself when Pope Francis was inaugurated; I was there too for the funeral of Pope John Paul II (me and about three million Poles) and I can vouch that these events are as ebullient as they seem from outside,

Thursday

Magnus Linklater

Fleet Street’s ‘wild Irish girl’

In her early days on Fleet Street, Mary Kenny, as she herself admits, was cast as ‘the wild Irish girl’, and did her best to live up to it. She held her own with the drinkers at El Vino’s, gave new meaning to the phrase ‘talking about Uganda’ when discovered in flagrante with an African lawyer,  and later rode the ‘condom train’ to flout Ireland’s contraception laws. Some of these stories surface in her memoir, Something of Myself and Others; others she draws a veil over, with a Catholic reticence of which her mother would doubtless have approved. Or perhaps she simply cannot remember them all. ‘Like much of my

Thursday

Michael Questier

Lords, spies and traitors in Elizabeth's England

There are still some sizeable holes in early modern English history and one of them is what we know — or, rather, do not know — about the aristocracy. Of course, peers who held high office under the Crown often have their biographers. But there is still a rooted assumption among scholars that the aristo-cracy as a caste or class was in decline during and after the later 16th century. If the papers have not survived, we are left with little idea about a peerage family apart from snippets of information and the odd anecdote. Also, the sort of documents which tend to get kept are the ‘boring’ ones —

Thursday

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Sex, secrets, and self-mortification: the dark side of the confessional

I have a confession to make. I really enjoyed this book. It’s been a while since I admitted something of the sort, and I feel ashamed, because, although it’s smartly, smoothly written, my pleasure was partly based on titillation. I smirked — I occasionally snickered — at the madder facts of self-mortification, whereby in the Middle Ages the (frequently female) faithful might flaunt their holiness in acts of rank humility. Elizabeth of Hungary kissed the feet of lepers; Margaret Marie Alacoque ate vomit; Catherine of Genoa, it’s said, sucked the pus of a plague victim. More than this, though, John Cornwell’s history of confession is preoccupied with sex, which always

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Fears for Scotland, and John Cornwell answers Melanie McDonagh

Save our Scotland Sir: Matthew Parris is quite right to praise Lord Lang’s speech in the Lords on Scottish independence 9 (‘The End of Britain’, 8 February) and there were other notable contributions, especially from Lord Kerr, on the European dimension, and Lord Robertson, the former secretary-general of Nato. But is anyone listening? The debate got virtually no coverage in the Scottish editions — and I suspect even less in the English ones. Meanwhile the SNP publicity machine rolls on here and is now promising an annual ‘Indy bonus’ of £600 for every man, woman and child in Scotland, exceeding the £500 threshold at which (as Alex Massie pointed out in

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Forgive me, Father

For non-Catholics, the most luridly fascinating aspect of Catholicism is confession. Telling your inmost sins — and we know what they are — to a male cleric, eh? In a darkened booth. How medieval is that? Well, the fantasies that people who never go to confession nurse about it are about to be shored up by a new book on the subject by the Catholic author John Cornwell. It’s called The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession. On the cover is a scary-looking picture of a confessional — not somewhere you’d take the children, frankly, but right at home in a Hitchcock movie. John Cornwell is a friend, and

Thursday

Blair Worden

What Englishmen learnt from Europe

The pattern of foreign travel by wealthy young Englishmen that became known as the Grand Tour began in the Renaissance and matured in the 17th century. In its origins it was a training for statesmanship. The state’s takeover of the church, which had done so much of the state’s official business, enlarged the employment opportunities of the nobility and gentry. So did the expansion of the government’s administrative resources and ambitions. But with the opportunities came challenges. Monarchs needed their advisers and officials and diplomats to be skilled and knowledgeable. So noblemen and gentlemen urged their sons to look beyond the accustomed pleasures of the hunting field and get down

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

The one man who makes me hope for peace in Syria

As Syria’s second peace conference looms, and we prepare ourselves for a lot of hot air drifting over from Geneva, I’ve been making a list of those players in the civil war who actually want peace and those who don’t fancy it one bit. The anti-peace side is easy. There’s Bashar al-Assad, of course. Hillary saw to that during the first conference. Perhaps she’s right that he shouldn’t be part of any transitional government, but if he loses all power, Assad and his Alawite clan are toast. So what use is peace to him? The rebels of the Islamic Front alliance are the latest Washington craze; they’re the alliance of

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Dot Wordsworth: We've been self-whipping since 1672

Isabel Hardman of this parish explained after last week’s government defeat that a deluded theory among the party leadership had held that Tory backbenchers were now self-whipping. When she aired this opinion on Radio 4, Michael White of the Guardian did a Frankie Howerd-style, ‘Ooh, Missus!’ routine. Surprisingly, self-whipping is no neologism. The satirical Nonconformist clergyman Robert Wild, in a poem on Charles II’s declaration of indulgence in 1672, refers to the ‘self-whippings, of the Popish Priests’. He meant the use of the discipline for ascetic motives. This was equally frowned upon by the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The calm, familiar hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ was

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Why G.K. Chesterton shouldn’t be made a saint

The bad news for fans of G.K. Chesterton is that there are moves afoot to make him a saint. The Catholic bishop of Northampton, Peter Doyle, is reportedly looking for a priest to promote his canonisation. Pope Francis is an admirer, too; he supported a Chesterton conference in Buenos Aires and was on the honorary committee of the Chesterton Society. So why is this a bad idea? Chesterton was, among other things, probably the most engaging apologist for Catholicism, long before he became a Catholic. His little book Orthodoxy is the best personal account of the faith you’ll come across — unabashedly subjective, wildly romantic, fundamentally right. His Napoleon of

Thursday

Susan Hill

The Breath of Night, by Michael Arditti

There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is subtle and shrewd enough to know that ‘issue books’, which are tracts not works of the imagination, are dull to read and rarely work as fiction should. He presents us with characters who are fully rounded, credible human beings living through moral dilemmas, affected by them, caring about them, living and dying within their context. In other words, he is an intelligent novelist. But he is also a good storyteller, so this new novel is both stirring and exciting to read, and has a setting which is not ‘background’ but

Thursday

Damian Thompson

The new God squad: what Archbishop Welby and Pope Francis have in common

It’s a few weeks after the election of Pope Francis, and a notoriously leaky church source is talking about the revolution to come. The new leader of the faithful is a sharp operator who finds himself surrounded by ‘a medieval court system of hopeless characters, each jealously guarding their own silos of activity. There’s lots of crap people in key positions.’ Meanwhile, away from the court, bureaucrats churn out windy memos. They may not know it yet, but the process of ‘clearing out the weeds’ will start soon — possibly as early as this August. That might seem over-ambitious, but we’re not talking about the sleepy Vatican. The source is

Friday

Freddy Gray

The political class's new phobia: big families

After almost a week of media breast-beating about the Philpott case, a creepy consensus is emerging over benefits for children. Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative backbencher, wants child benefit to be limited in future to a family’s first two children. Lots of Tories agree. So does former Tony Blair speechwriter, Philip Collins. ‘This would save £3.3 billion if it were applied to all recipients,’ he writes in his Times column today. ‘Many working people take the responsible view that, though they would love another child, they cannot afford it. Well, yes. No doubt out there is a degree of feckless fecundity among claimants, and that’s a bad thing. We should not incentivise

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

At last! A tango-dancing pope

Just a year ago on this page I was writing about Pope Benedict XVI’s elder brother Georg and how, while ostensibly discreet and loyal to his celebrated sibling, he contrived at the same time to make him look too old and bumbling for the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. In a book, My Brother, the Pope, this old priest from Bavaria said that his younger brother had never wanted the job, was too physically frail for it, and found it a tremendous strain. Georg Ratzinger must now be feeling somewhat vindicated, but at the time he was ‘off message’, for the Vatican was insistent that the pope was on