Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: Joan Kelly (nee O'Sullivan), (Anniv).
11.00: Members of the Lee family, (RIP).
6.30: Delia Mannion, (Anniv).

AS I WAS SAYING.....

The British Minister for Education is an Irishwoman, Ruth Kelly. Educated at Oxford and the London School of Economics, she worked as economics correspondent at the 'liberal' Guardian newspaper. First elected in May 1997, she rounded off a busy week by giving birth to her first son six days later! She is the youngest woman ever to sit in the British Cabinet, and is the mother of four young children. Most unusual of all though, she is a practicing Catholic, and a member of Opus Dei. She declined a job in the Department of Health because of her religious objections to abortion.

It emerged this week that Kelly's department granted permission for a man, Paul Reeve, who had been cautioned by police for viewing child pornography, to be employed at a school on the basis that he had not been convicted of an offence. He was not on the Department's prohibited list. This was the signal for the moral watchdogs, the tabloids, to declare 'open season' on Kelly. Downing Street were forced to deny that she was about to lose her job.

More problems arose when William Gibson, a teacher, who was convicted in 1980 for indecent assault on a 15- year-old girl, got a job at a school on the basis of a letter from her Department. Without a shred of evidence, some hinted that her Catholicism had led her to be soft on child abuse, citing her Church's undistinguished recent record in tackling the problem. Paul Reeve did accept a police caution. But his alternative was a criminal trial. He strongly denied accessing child porn. No evidence was brought forward to contradict him. There is also more to Gibson's assault than meets the narrow legal eye: he later married his victim and they had three children. While his behaviour was not edifying, it hardly amounts to paedophilia.

Little evidence is needed to destroy lives and careers. We now sneer at the 17th century witch-hunts. But we have our own superstitious intolerance that undermines any concept of natural justice. Normal rules about presumption of innocence, and judicial fairness seem to be suspended.

Obviously, the safety of children is paramount. But reason must rule. Irrational impulses must be reined in. The customary standards of 'solid evidence' must be rigorously adhered to. The alternative is to hand the whole 'show' over to the baying mob! (Remember, in another context, the Birmingham Six and the Guilford Four?)

The most insidious form of child abuse today lies in our sex-fixated, relentlessly hedonistic public culture, where modesty is viewed as abnormal. Explicit sexual imagery, which two decades ago would have been confined to sleaze-joints like Soho, is now mainstream. The tabloids and TV channels, now baying for Ruth Kelly's blood, are the very ones who built this highly sexualised culture, and in the process, made vast fortunes on the dubious foundation of instant sexual gratification. It is vital that this hypocrisy is exposed and that Ruth Kelly survives. The tabloids moved us all that bit closer to the cesspit this week.

Unfortunately, the same process is afoot here in Ireland.

-Dick Lyng

The True Face of Catholicism

Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical confirms him as a man of humour, warmth, humility and compassion, eager to share the love that God "lavishes" on humanity and display it as the answer to the world's deepest needs. On his election last spring, the former Cardinal Ratzinger was widely assumed to have as his papal agenda the hammering of heretics and a war on secularist relativism, subjects with which he was associated as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Instead he has produced a profound, lucid, poignant and at times witty discussion of the relationship between sexual love and the love of God, the fruit no doubt of a lifetime's meditation. This is a document that presents the most attractive face of the Catholic faith and could be put without hesitation into the hands of any inquirer.

Unlike his predecessor, Benedict is not instantly comfortable as the focus of a huge crowd. But John Paul II, so charismatic in the flesh, was often hard to follow when he turned to the word. His encyclicals were wonderful intellectual journeys that repaid the great effort needed to understand them.

Benedict's Deus Caritas Est is by comparison an easy read, full of well-turned arresting sentences. "The epicure Gassendi used to offer Descartes the humorous greeting: 'O, Soul!' And Descartes would reply: 'O, Flesh!'," the Pope remarks. "Yet it is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both dimensions are truly united, does man attain his full stature."

About the only flaw in the English text, indeed, is its non-use of inclusive language: for "man" read "man and woman". But he makes no other sexist point; there is no attempt to distinguish female sexual love from the male version, no flirting with the madonna-whore dichotomy, no judgemental talk of what sexual love is ordained for, nor even of exploitation and sexual sin. Men and women who leave eros in the domain of their animal natures, without regard to the spiritual, are simply told that they are missing the true greatness that God intended for them; a lost opportunity rather than the road to perdition.

The second part of the encyclical, which is said to owe something to an unfinished project of the previous Pope, ties up a loose end in Catholic social teaching by addressing the question how, in a world seeking social justice, there is still room for charity. The answer is a compelling one. But this is still Ratzinger rather than Wojtyla, with his warning that it is not for the Church to take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. "She cannot and must not replace the State," he insists. Yet at the same time she must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice.

This is a remarkable, enjoyable and even endearing product of Pope Benedict's first few months. If first encyclicals set the tone for a new papacy, then this one has begun quite brilliantly.

-Tablet editor, 28-01-2006.

Items of Interest

Valid HTML 4.01 Strict