Christianity

After Pope Francis emerged from the Gemelli hospital in Rome last month, a reflection attributed to him a few years ago returned to circulation. It was on ‘hospital’. Some of it was the usual, about how it’s where like meets unlike (‘In intensive care you see a Jew taking care of a racist’ etc). Some seems like standard homely Francis: ‘This life will pass quickly, so do not waste it fighting with people… Do not worry too much about keeping the house spotless.’ And it ended: ‘Love more, forgive more, embrace more… And leave the rest in the hands of the Creator.’ That was the disconcerting thing about Francis. Everything eventually boiled down to the love of God. It’s why even sound criticism of him somehow misses the mark.

I wasn’t brought up in the faith. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist lay-preacher, but when my mother left County Durham for marriage in south-west Scotland, she left the religion of her childhood behind. My Scottish father’s experience of church gave him an odd penchant for the electric organ, but that was about it. So when, at the age of 12, I screwed up my courage and came out as a Christian, Dad put his hand on my shoulder – for the only time – and said: ‘It’s OK, son; it’s just a phase.’ Now, as my Christian phase approaches its seventh decade, I find myself looking back and wondering what had happened to me. What caused me to risk that first venture of exposed dissidence? There were mediating institutions and people, of course.

Reality check Sir: While I share Mr Gove’s diagnosis of lodestar-less Starmerism (‘Cruel Labour’, 5 April), I cannot share the accompanying pearl-clutching. For decades, politicians and voters have engaged in a mutually reinforcing entitlement spiral that took it as given that the civil service and welfare bill could expand ad infinitum, that working for a living was optional, and that our geopolitical enemies didn’t really mean what they said. This fantastical worldview was predicated on an equally fantastical delusion that cheap energy, low inflation and low interest rates were locked in rather than temporary historical blips. You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

I am a priest in the high church tradition of the Church of England. The technical term is Anglo-Catholicism, but I come from a very different Christian background. My heritage is non-conformist evangelical – I was baptised in a swimming pool in the summer of my first year of university. St James’s in Piccadilly hosts events featuring ‘icons’ from RuPaul’s Drag Race UK It’s a long story as to how I’ve ended up wearing a chasuble and celebrating ‘Mass’, but a big part of it has been to do with church architecture. After several years in the charismatic evangelical scene, I became fascinated with the beauty of medieval churches, particularly cathedrals. I began to think of the large white-cuboid former bingo hall owned by our church as soulless and empty.

David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, and Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, had rather tellingly different responses to the latest wave of violence in Syria. Lammy deplored the ‘horrific violence’ but failed to address where that violence was coming from. Rubio, by contrast, stated clearly that ‘radical Islamist terrorists’ were targeting minorities in Syria, including Alawites, Christians and Druze. Rubio is right. While precise numbers are difficult to ascertain, it appears that, according to a source verified by the Hungarian government’s State Secretariat for the Aid of Persecuted Christians – the only one in the world – up to 3,000 people may have been killed, the majority of them innocent Alawite civilians. A number of Christians have also been killed.

On Thursday 16 August 1739, the young John Wesley met and for an hour argued with the middle-aged Bishop of Bristol, Joseph Butler. It was an ill-tempered encounter. Wesley believed that God communicated directly with individuals, invested his promises and purposes in them personally, and charged them with missions to reveal and explain the divine will. Butler, famous for his rationalism, reacted with cold indignation. ‘Sir,’ he told Wesley, ‘the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.’ The Bishop spoke for England. We do not ‘do’ God – not even the 49 per cent of us who actually believe in God.

Paris What possible crime has the award-winning novelist Boualem Sansal committed that merits being locked away for three months now by the Algerian police? Listen to the Algerian government – and its cheerleaders on social media – and theanswer appears to be that he is at best a stooge for the French far right, at worst an outright traitor. Friends of the man paint another picture: a gently spoken free-thinker with the courage to speak his mind. Sansal, who is 80 and suffers from cancer, was arrested at Algiers airport on 16 November as he got off a plane from Paris. He has been in an Algiers prison ever since, with visits to hospital for treatment. His Parisian lawyer, François Zimeray, has still not been given a visa, so the charges are unclear.