At the Vatican 1793

An English aristocrat attends a papal ceremony in St Peter’s

I saw the Pope [Pius VI] give his benediction to a kneeling and believing multitude. The sight was imposing. He is an excellent actor; Garrick could not have represented the part with more theatrical effect than his present Holiness. I was grievously disappointed at the Miserere, the composition of Pergolesi, sung by differently modulated voices in the Sistine Chapel.

The illumination of the great cross inside St. Peter’s was very striking: the effect of the light upon the monumental effigies raised the painful recollection of death, the sombre of the objects and the locality inspired melancholy.

We went about to various chapels, where we found many a debauched fair one in the comely attire of matronly humility, expiating in penance and prayer many a dear sin, for the sole purpose of beginning a fresh catalogue of the cherished crimes.

From Elizabeth Lady Holland Journal vol 1 p128 Courtesy of the Gutenberg Project

The Bible encountered

Anno 1530, at the Imperial Assembly at Augsburg, Albertus, Bishop of Mentz, by chance had got into his hands the Bible, and for the space of four hours he continued reading therein; at last, one of his Council on a sudden came into his bed-chamber unto him, who, seeing the Bible in the Bishop’s hand, was much amazed thereat, and said unto him, “what doth your Highness with that book?”  The Archbishop thereupon answered him, and said, “I know not what this book is, but sure I am, all that is written therein is quite against us.”

From Luther’s table talk

Watchfulness

The man who arises in faith, who ever remembers his high purpose, whose work is pure, and who carefully considers his work, who in self-possession lives the life of perfection, and who ever, for ever, is watchful, that man shall arise in glory.

By arising in faith and watchfulness, by self-possession and self-harmony, the wise man makes an island for his soul which many waters cannot overflow.

The Dhammapada; tr J Mascaro 2:24,25

Monks giving

From the Travels of Marco Polo, Book 1, Chapter 12

On the borders of (the territory of) Tauris there is a monastery called after Saint Barsamo, a most devout Saint. There is an Abbot, with many Monks, who wear a habit like that of the Carmelites, and these to avoid idleness are continually knitting woollen girdles. These they place upon the altar of St. Barsamo during the service, and when they go begging about the province (like the Brethren of the Holy Spirit) they present them to their friends and to the gentlefolks, for they are excellent things to remove bodily pain; wherefore everyone is devoutly eager to possess them.

Coronation questions

Now that the date of the next coronation has been announced, we have some seven months within which to plan everything leading up to May 2023.  Charles III has already made known some suggestions for making the central event of the festivities more inclusive. Voices warning against ‘wokeness’ or inviting this or that important foreigner are raised. This is ample proof that the coronation debate has already begun.

It cannot proceed, however, unless and until some important questions have been posed and answered. It has to be now. The process is under way. Whitehall already has its own logistics and choreographic plans in place, reviewed every month and shared with appropriate partners and stakeholders such as the security services, the military and local government.

The purpose of the event is universally taken as read.  It is all efficiently, even magnificently done but what is it all for?

Some sort of ceremony to mark the induction of a new head of state is staged by almost all cultures.  The more historically aware, or the more monarchical, the more elaborate the rite.  This is so even in the case of ostensibly non-royals such as the Pope who was until recently enthroned and mitred in astonishingly pharaonic style.

God save

But this particular example points to a problem shared by all of those communities which have, rather than term-limited presidents, crowned heads who have the job for life.  This means that the people are expected to acclaim the enthronement without knowing for sure whether the new royal office-holder, ostensibly chosen by God, will turn out be worthy of acclamation, let alone successful. In short, they are stuck with her or him till death, a point which is firmly underlined in the coronation rite.

But of course the job-for-life (“May the king live for ever!”) is sometimes curtailed. Action to end an unsatisfactory reign, it is felt, by elites with the power to do so, becomes necessary.  Time was, in western monarchies, when a legitimate reign (“chosen by God”) could be ended violently. In England this has been done variously by expulsion (James II), accidental homicide (William II), imprisonment and murder (Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI, Edward V), trial and execution (Charles I) or death in battle (Harold II, Richard III). 

With one exception, all these deaths took place before 1650.  Thereafter, monarchies’ power diminished, reign by reign, as first the aristocracy and then the people developed and exercised their counterweight.  The Abdication of 1936 made this visible.  It became unnecessary to subject the sovereign to any form of state violence. So the power, the importance of and influence of the crown declined. Historians have dismissed the period as being that of ‘a barely tolerated oligarchy.’ The last king of England to attempt any unilateral political action was William IV in 1831. 

Only 36 years later, the ideal monarch’s function was definitively described by Walter Bagehot, in The English Constitution, published in 1867. In it, he asserted that a constitution needed two parts, ‘one to excite and preserve the reverence of the population’ and the other to ’employ that homage in the work of government’. The first part he called ‘dignified’ and the second ‘efficient'(Google). This assessment holds true today.

Rebranding

For the Victorians, this status quo had risks.  Monarchy seemed ineluctably doomed to slide into mediocracy; worse still, a real rebranding chance was being missed. The expanding empire needed a God-given person to symbolise it at the apex with all the appropriate panoply and ceremonial this required.  Hence the deliberate expansion and refurbishment of, for example, the state opening of parliament, or Britain’s Indian Empire. Thus was proclaimed a message in every case, in code.

The concept of deploying pageantry to enact the salient features of the constitution survived the onset of the twentieth century and was solidly in place by the time television arrived, partly animating a slow decline in deference and other attitudes, as we shall see.

Let the people see

The long reign of Elizabeth II has revived interest in her coronation in 1953.

This was the country’s first national television event.  Thousands participated virtually. That gathering had its effects, not least for Britons’ view of their polity. To watch it now is to be struck by the stately colour and majesty of the ceremony but also by nagging questions about certain features of it.  The 1953 coronation included assumptions which, like all assumptions, inevitably modulated as time passed. Autre temps, autres mœurs.

Why, for example, are there so many peers and their coronets on display? Who was invited (apparently the queen was startled to be told that trade union leaders would be in the congregation)?  What is the queen wearing?  Why is there a canopy suddenly brought on stage, temporarily restricting our sight of the anointing?  What anointing?

The answers to some of these questions are more easily proffered than others.  The slow decline of the hereditary aristocracy and its gradual replacement by life peers (by the Life Peerages Act 1958) has had its visible effect.  It is not inconceivable to assume that only a handful of peers, unencumbered by ermine, will be members of the 2,000-strong congregation in 2023. 

By the same token, Britain’s multi-ethnic diversity will be conspicuously visible in a way that would have been inconceivable in 1953.  So will the sight of faith leaders ranged in the chancel politely watching what will be, pace the king, the essentially Anglican ceremonial (including a mass).  What in particular will they make of the anointing?

The will be no problem for the Chief Rabbi, for one.  The Bible reverently “records that Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon king” (I Kings 1:28-53).  Further pregnant symbolism marks this, the climax of the whole rite: just before the actual crowning, the king is presented with triumphant regalia: the orb and sceptre, the rod and cross. All signify lordship, dominion and power.

“Receive the Royal Sceptre, the ensign of kingly power and justice”, intones the Archbishop.  The canopy has been drawn away and the king proceeds to the Eucharist.

At this point it’s worth reflecting on this and all the other parts of the liturgy which are certain to involve debate well before the coronation plan is finalised by the relevant working party.

God save the king

The most obvious features of the 1953 coronation http://www.oremus.org/liturgy/coronation/cor1953b.html are the assumptions on which it was based. 

Chief among these is the notion that there has to be a coronation at all and that the monarch is ‘not real’ until this is carried out.  Wrong.  Then there is the assumption that the enthronement ceremony has to be of a religious nature, specifically Christian.  Within this requirement is the fact that this means that it is the Church of England and not some other denomination which is in charge, using the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as its text. This book’s Oath section includes the question “Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law?” followed by a clause specifying the C of E (and a very short mention of the Church of Scotland).  This is not religion, but politics.

In1953 the queen was also asked, “Will you solemnly promise and swear to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon, and of your Possessions and other Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs?”  Of the six independent nations briefly listed here – then members of the Commonwealth, though that term appears only once in the service – three have had troubled relations with the British in their time.  That fact itself sounds strangely imperial. 

In what has followed on from that era of Crown dependencies and decolonisation, it is startling to hear the exhortation which reads, “Receive this Orb set under the Cross, and remember that the whole world is subject to the Power and Empire of Christ our Redeemer.” The Winds of Change speech was less than seven years away.

The list goes on.  Every part of the service contains its antique surprises.  One in particular catches the modern eye.  As part of the Regalia section, the Anointing ceremony, as we have seen, takes place beneath a canopy, and involves the archbishop tabbing a special oil on the monarch’s head, breast, wrists etc out of sight of the congregation.  This procedure borders on the shamanistic.  In the archaic discourse of the 1953 ceremony, however, it does not particularly stand out; if it is included in 2023, it will seem very strange and intrusive, almost sinister.

Receive this crown

When I first heard the date of Charles’ coronation my initial reaction was to assume that the order of service would have to be revisited and amended where necessary, and that working parties were already on the job.  Having now studied the 1953 service and also the 1902 one, my fondness for state occasions, historic events, parades and heraldry remains undiminished.  I like the solemn majesty of it all, especially the British version.  But there has to be a degree of realism.

Second, the 1953 service cannot possibly be retuned or amended for deployment in 2023. Too much context has changed.   The service will have to be recast so that it becomes suitable and relevant for public acceptance as it is today: inclusive, multicultural, and clearly linked to the lives we all have now.  If that means retaining some of the religious element in modern language but junking the regalia and the imperious tone then so be it.

We have been here before.  In 1902 the relevant committee of bishops found it necessary to emphasise that the upcoming coronation of Edward VII should be dominated by its religious component in the way that 64 years before had not been an unrehearsed feature of Victoria’s coronation.  Amidst all the imperial pageantry, so the bishops ruled, the sacred priority should prevail.  The link between what Simon Jenkins has called ‘British Shinto’ and the supposed demands of the state has never been so clearly and emphatically forged.

 Why should the service be religious at all?  The steady decline of religious observance in our community means that for many, many onlookers (let alone those watching from abroad) the whole spectacle will be so much gobbledygook, some of it offensive. 

Now it is time to engineer a wholesale change for the times we live in now and the people we have become, because without that corrective the whole national narrative risks being damaged irreparably.  By all means keep the regalia on display in the Tower but inside and outside the Abbey let us celebrate who we really are.   Let us have a new coronation that we can cheer.

Assumptions

Assumptions are useful in narratives but can be treacherous; damagingly so in religion.

Not everything is ever spelled out in full.  As readers or listeners we accept, at least for now, that a story does not need to set out for us every detail of what it is about. Some elements – things or actions or ideas, hinted at to a greater or lesser extent – can be assumed.  In the interest of pressing on or saving time, they are silently understood, swiftly taken as read: they are nuggets of reference jointly recognised by writer and reader and accepted as useful shorthand material.  This acceptance is the case even where those shared assumptions, working as signifiers, entail magisterial beliefs or those which are widely held, or sacred imagery. 

This underlies the fact that assumptions have power.  They are short cuts which can skew arguments, memories and statements of fact.  They can harbour bias or foment prejudice. They underpin the narratives of collective unconscious the contents of which Jung taught us to identify as ‘culture-driven archetypes.’  As revelatory drivers they can be potent. They operate even when we would prefer or expect them to be secret.

We see assumptions – short cuts to archetypes – as particularly useful in at least three realms of human experience: philosophy, art and religion. 

In the case of philosophy, there is so much that is relevant to consider, from the immaterialism of Bishop Berkeley to the epistemology of Immanuel Kant and then on to the theories of Jacques Derrida and their opponents. (Here, it will be only too apparent that this post is being written without the benefit of any formal training in structuralism, semiotics, the distinction between the signifier and the signified or their correlation etc etc). For hundreds of years, philosophers – and artists – have tried to come to terms with what it means to be real, and how we can handle the meaninglessness that confronts us every day.  Alluding necessarily entails things taken as read, but is it always safe to do so?

The arts and literature are particularly adept at hinting at things not immediately obvious at the surface, let alone clear.  The consumer, auditor, viewer, reader is made to co-operate with the artist in assuming that some components of the narrative are so potentially obvious that they can be taken as read.  The fact that Mr Collins is a twit is not stipulated by Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice; all she has to do is set out the evidence.  Paintings by J M W Turner and, after him, the impressionists sketch smoke or steam without finding it necessary to depict machinery or architecture – ostensibly the picture’s subject – in any detail.  In modern film culture, the slithery sound of a saxophone solo riff signals lust.  That master of English prose, Evelyn Waugh, in a long paragraph in Brideshead Revisited manages to describe a fatal avalanche in a snowy landscape without anywhere using the word ‘cold.’

There are covert messages such as these in many famous works of art, balancing disclosure with artful reticence. They take it that we can recognise sly indicators when we meet up with them, particularly in the realms of metaphor and allusion.

This kind of shorthand becomes a problem if and when in practice we fail to recognise, in any given case, where we are along the spectrum that extends from non-literality all the way to realism and actuality.  It is important to bear in mind that this spectrum does not function mechanically to quantify or measure the degree to which the object can be understood as real.  As I have noted elsewhere, the storyteller does not find it necessary to submit her or his narrative to any tests of believability we might insist on applying as a precondition of our auditing of it: s/he simply assumes that we the auditors have a basic understanding of, and are hospitable to, appropriate registers of narrative.  To restate the obvious phrase, we simply are to take it as read and let the narrator get on with it. 

In this, as is so often the case, Shakespeare is the master: the lyrical statement “This is Illyria, lady” (Twelfth Night, Act 1 Scene 2) invokes all that can be imagined and assumed about a strange realm in a single line. 

This presupposition is most clearly seen in traditional drama, from Euripides to Punch and Judy shows where there is no space or time available for detailed exposition and it is assumed that the audience have a basic level of understanding what is being enacted.  Whether or not of the Punch puppets are ‘real’ presents no problem for children watching them; they readily accept that what they are witnessing, and learning about, is a dramatized and enjoyable, and even scary, version of the powerful truths sewn into the real world fabric of the fears and joys of everyday family life.  

Which brings us to religion.

If we have belief, what are we bidden to assume?   Religions are complex accumulations of code, and great blocks of meaning, doctrine or reference. 

Some basic assumptions are ubiquitously common in religious scripture, messages, doctrine and practice: the status and contribution of women, for example; the existence and the actions of a spirit world; the awfulness of death and the desirability of eternal life; the God Person wielding active verbs; Christianity’s unique and central claim. 

It is not always possible to stop and challenge any of these assumptions when we encounter them.  They are so firmly embedded in their hosts’ theology that dismantling any of them seems at first sight to be unthinkable; blasphemous, even.  Nevertheless, it is now open to us at least to unpack and examine them and we are, if we so wish, free to pursue such enquiries to see wherever they might lead. 

If left too long, assumptions shift their meaning and surreptitiously decay.  They need frequent review.  This is particularly the case where, like a receding tide, the cultural ocean we live in, and which shapes our thinking, reveals something on the beach we do not need any more.

Women

Throughout history and in most cultures women have been assumed to be inferior to men.  Nowhere is this paradigm more evident than in the Bible.  Out of numerous examples, one particular assumption stands out: St Paul’s notorious statement, “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence” (1 Timothy 2:12) which has often been used to justify many an offence, and is probably more quoted than what appears to be the counterpart aphorism, “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies” (Proverbs 31:10) Statements like these could not have been included in the canon were it not for an underlying assumption current at the time, but not so acceptable now.

Shakespeare, writing in 1606, provides a sly two-edged comment complimenting one woman but noting her value to men:  “Bring forth men-children only/For thy undaunted mettle should compose/Nothing but males” (Macbeth 1:5) The force of a statement like this one in the mouth of an anti-hero depends on what relevant attitude the audience is assumed to hold both individually and collectively.  

To remain useful, reliable and apt, assumptions cannot function if they are not subject to frequent review.  

God

The underlying assumption in the People of the Book is that God is masculine.  We are to treat Him therefore as we would any good but demanding father.  His maleness dictates what attributes or roles we must readily and routinely subscribe to Him: Master, Lord, King. The principle behaviour we must adopt towards Him, therefore, is obedience.  He rules; we obey.  When we misbehave, He is Angry.  When we do wrong, He punishes us.

The main corollary of this is presumably that God being that, and we being this, we stand in need of go-betweens.  This role, whether it be exercised by Moses, the Prophet or Jesus Christ, is primarily one of intercession.  Who, it is assumed, is particularly well equipped to plead for forgiveness and mercy? 

To answer this question is to recall that as well as fulfilling the intercession role religions have a mission to explain. 

Western Christianity has at least one obvious candidate for this explanatory role, reinforced by frequent invocation.  At one level down, as it were, Catholicism’s devotion of the Virgin Mary usefully functions as a kind of anti-assumption: a counterweight to divine maleness, continually reminding us of the feminine element in our worship. 

But it is a given that this element is still inferior: the BVM is a second-order being who intercedes for us with the King of Heaven, not as a Co-Redemptor but a supplicant; one that is very much alive and accessible to believers but still emphatically female.  The assumption, rooted in a certain age-old view of women, is that the BVM represents a singularly effective and proper court of appeal permitted to fill what amounts to a gender-specific gap in the divine offering.

Spirit world

Around the globe, it is probable that most people believe in the existence of a spirit world, parallel to this one, with the will and power to affect things on earth. This belief, challenged by the Enlightenment but never left behind, makes demands.  It shades into concepts of the divine and of an afterlife, and thence to beliefs about morality and ethics.

What are we meant to assume about this parallel location?  Is it ‘good’ or ’bad’ over there?  Do we have any power to affect it?  This line of questioning is as true of Taoism as much as it is of the Judeo-Christian belief system: the Tao Te Ching poses the relevant question as “If heaven and earth cannot make things eternal how is it possible for man?” (Ch 23) but in doing so assumes that there is another world ‘out there’ but within the same morality frame of reference as ours has.

Death and resurrection

Over the past few centuries, attitudes to death, at least in the West, have changed.  The medieval idea reflected the fatalism engendered by all too high death rates and, before the development of medicine, the seemingly capricious nature of health and its vulnerabilities.  Before the modern age, and its ever-growing arsenal of diagnostic tools and science-based treatments, health was assumed to be subject to, and dependent on, behaviour in this world and the here and now.  To be sick was to be guilty.

That assumption changed over time as our knowledge expanded and attitudes changed.  They had to. Previous ages meditated on death in ways that we no longer think proper or useful, let alone acceptable. Spreading noise-suppressing straw in the street in front of a house where someone is dying was a trivial example.  Some Latin cultures have long mummified cadavers in underground galleries visited by family members once a year. 

Such features of public piety, as alien to us as Bishop Fox’s tomb in Winchester Cathedral, depicting the great man as a rotting corpse, show how far we in the West have travelled in the cultural domestication of death.  It would be inconceivable to construct such a monument now, so discreet and bland the underlying assumptions about death, and the fear of death, have become.

God as Person

In almost all religious systems there is, to a greater or lesser extent, a degree to which the divine is perceived as an entity separate from humankind and encountered as such.  The variation stretches all the way from the object of primitive idol worship, to the divinity that is intensely felt as ‘God with me’, right through to the sort of contemplative non-realistic theism that accepts that “the Tao is elusive and intangible” (Tao Te Ching Ch 21).  For the People of the Book, this gradation of access ranges from, say, the presence and solidity of the negotiating God of Genesis 18 and the stigmata of Padre Pio right through to the mystical Sufism tradition of Islam.

Despite all this multiform, one basic assumption underlies almost all such constructs: the idea that the divine has a distinct personality (or a set of them) with whom we choose (or not) to interact.  

The most obvious manifestation of this personality is encapsulated, basically enough, by its ubiquitous use of the active voice for verbs.  A phrase such as ‘God said’ invites us to respond to an entity ‘over against’ which we act or speak in some way.  Rather, in almost all religious discourse, it is that we are compelled to acknowledge not only the very existence of the interlocutor, let alone its otherness and potentiality.  Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “the mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.”

The obvious objection to all this is that it amounts to mere pantheism: the notion that “God” and nature (or the universe) are one.  But why should we assume that this is a problem?  As an epistemological concept it has been around for centuries. It would not alarm the devotee of any of the great Eastern faiths which accept that, in our terms, both logical and mythical, God is ‘no thing.’

I want to suggest that this amounts to a clearing of the ground on which it is possible to build an argument for faith that does not depend on any anthropomorphic assumption or confabulation, still less subscription to a body of prescriptive doctrine deploying it.

Questions

Once we allow ourselves to visualise what might be the consequences of breaking free from the concept of ever being able to define the divine, the landscape broadens ineluctably.  All sorts of things suddenly become possible.  Two or three of these immediately become clear.  I merely pose them as questions for which there are answers that I do not propose to examine here.

The first possibility is that at a stroke, re-examining assumptions embedded in religious belief opens new vistas and perspectives.  Challenging assumptions allows us to look at events or characteristics in new ways. 

This can be painful.  Why, for example, do we take it as read that Mary was a virgin when the relevant verse of the Old Testament, apparently foreshadowing her (Is 7:14) is more correctly translated as ‘young woman’ (Almah)?  Doesn’t this mean that the whole Mariolatry edifice, based on the idea that she is or was not human, completely falls at a stroke? 

Similarly why should we share St Paul’s foundational assumptions about life and death? They enable him to build a credal superstructure of doctrine based on the premise that death is a horror from which, under certain circumstances, we are entitled to escape into eternal life, or try to.  This belief both reinforces and derives support from the notion that, as death is understood to be God’s punishment we have incurred by our Original Sin, our central obligation must be to strive to have this punishment annulled: “propitiation for our sins.”

To put it plainly, this whole concept of redemption vis-à-vis a demanding deity whom we must placate in order to win freedom from death the ultimate negative stands or falls on the assumption that life is a reward for which we bargain with an entity disposed, or not, to grant it. What kind of God is that?

The question becomes acute, of course, in any attitude we might adopt about the Passion and the Crucifixion.  The idea that God chose to allow Jesus to be put to death because of our sinfulness is hard to disentangle from the mightiest pillars of the Christian faith.  In terms of that faith, we are instructed to assume that this, Paul’s core idea is the correct one.  If we dare to query this, we risk injuring what we have been taught.  If so, then this is a prime example of an important assumption turning out to be a third rail: a potential source of injury for anybody who gets this far.  

“All talk about God staggers under impossible difficulties.” (Karen Armstrong  A history of God, 1993 p8) “  I suspect that there is no straight answer to this particular problem, but only provisional statements that are all we can hope for, for now.  If so, then it is correct to recall that even verified assumptions mutate, die, and are replaced by other ones.  That is a natural progression: “The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.”  [To be continued]

God is where?

What does it mean to say ‘I believe in God’? As the modern phrase puts it, ‘It’s complicated.’  So why do so many people insist that it’s not?

Taormina in 1912

For anyone who has visited Taormina in Sicily and warmed to its glossy and intimate charm, the following extract from its description by an American tourist over a hundred years ago will be of particular interest:

Patience of a saint

John Henry Newman has now been declared a saint.  It seems the right moment to delve into his voluminous  writings and come out with gems such as this cry from a bruised heart (courtesy of the Gutenberg project).

“Do not be too eager to suppose you are ill-treated for your religion’s sake. Make as light of matters as you can. And beware of being severe on those who lead careless lives, or whom you think or know to be ill-treating you. Do not dwell on such matters. Turn your mind away from them. Avoid all gloominess. Be kind and gentle to those who are perverse, and you will very often, please God, gain them over. You should pray for those who lead careless lives, and especially if they are unkind to you. Who knows but God may hear your prayers, and turn their hearts, and bring them over to you? Do everything for them but imitate them and yield to them. This is the true Christian spirit, to be meek and gentle under ill-usage, cheerful under slander, forgiving towards enemies, and silent in the midst of angry tongues” (Sermons Vol VIII: X).

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24284/pg24284-images.html

 

The Herald’s message

A friend lets me see his copy of the Catholic Herald every week.  I read it with a mixture of horror and fascination.  As a church-going Anglican I find its stance – its self-portrayal as the representative of an oppressed minority in a hostile world – grating and irritating. Dominated by a handful of regular contributors, the letters column provides a weekly window on nostalgia for a pre-Vatican II sensibility.  A yearning for the Latin Mass is evident whilst for example the present pope is routinely treated with mistrustful ambivalence and generous coverage of his opponents’ pronouncements.

Despite its disdain for all things Anglican, the Herald finds space each week for surprisingly numerous mentions of the Church of England.  The tone varies between loftiness and wistfulness but the overall impression is that of sibling rivalry and inter-brand contention.

That is how it should be.  However much the Catholic church insists on its unique claims on the faith (extra ecclesiam nulla salus) the fact remains that Jesus himself stated that ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions‘(John 14:2).  Like any other human creation – for that is what it is – Catholicism has many variations and, despite what Cardinal Burke says, a necessary capacity to embrace change.  There is enough to show that the Catholic Herald knows this. That is how a weekly diet of studied ambiguity makes it dependably ever interesting.  I’ll go on reading it.