Read the World Youth Day blog.

“Life is not just a succession of events or experiences, helpful though many of them are. It is a search for the true, the good and the beautiful. It is to this end that we make our choices; it is for this that we exercise our freedom; it is in this – in truth, in goodness, and in beauty – that we find happiness and joy. Do not be fooled by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth.” - Pope Benedict on arrival in Sydney.

But on another matter…

The New Yorker magazine recently lent its prestige to the 100^th anniversary of G.K. Chesterton’s popular introduction to Christianity, Orthodoxy, by publishing a major article by Adam Gopnik called ‘The Back of the World’ (7 and 14 July 2008). The article is appreciative of GKC’s genius, although the author’s bias is clear from his description of Chesterton’s most strenuous advocates as ‘conservative pre-Vatican II types who are indignant about his neglect without stopping to reflect how much their own uncritical enthusiasm may have contributed to it.’ It would be fairer, I think, these days to describe GKC’s main advocates as ‘post-Vatican II radicals’.

Gopnik describes Chesterton, rightly, as a ‘hearty mystic’ who saw all things in what he once called the ‘white light of wonder’; and as the ‘grandfather of Slow Food, of local eating, of real ale, the first strong mind that saw something evil in the levelling of little pleasures’. He locates Chesterton’s masterpiece (or the nearest he came to one) not in Christian apologetics such as Orthodoxy but in a novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, written with ‘nightmarish intensity’ on a theme that has recently become all too relevant – Chesterton’s ‘anarchists’ are today’s ‘terrorists’. The novel has a profundity that stands the test of time. Insightfully, Gopnik goes from there to Chesterton’s Catholic conversion in 1922: ‘If you want a solution, at once authoritarian and poetic, to the threat of moral anarchism, then Catholicism, which built Chartres and inspired Dante, looks a lot better than Scotland Yard. If you want stability allied to imagination, Catholicism has everything else beat.’

Yet the article is leading up to a serious accusation – the mild anti-semitism even Chesterton’s admirers must recognize in him (and which was commonplace in England before the Second World War) not only became an ‘ugly and obsessive’ hatred after 1918, but ‘is not incidental’ and in fact arises from ‘the logic of his poetic position’ – his love of the local. That simply does not wash, for locality does not imply homogeneity in Chesterton’s vision, but rather variety. If as Gopnik claims he viewed all Jews as in some sense ‘aliens’, and even English Jews (including his own friends) as essentially ‘foreigners’, it came from taking seriously the image of a Chosen People temporarily deprived of a Promised Land, and from mixing up religious with ethnic identity. I would not want to defend all of Chesterton’s opinions on the Jews, but it is a slur to say he hated them, and indeed his Jewish friendships and even his writings point in quite another direction. Gopnik himself admits that Chesterton was no fascist, spoke out against the persecution in Germany, and was emphatically opposed to any kind of genocide.

Gopnik does not understand Chesterton’s Catholicism, or the ‘conversion sickness’ which made him see his newly adopted faith as ‘a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday’. It is true, I suppose, as Gopnik argues, that English writing changed after 1918, leaving Chesterton’s accounts of Christianity looking a bit too boisterous and blustery to be taken seriously. Perhaps today we need a more nuanced apologetic – even, at times, a more apologetic apologetics. But not all change is for the best, and sometimes Chesterton’s apparent crudity marks a deeper subtlety, as Aidan Nichols recently argued in a series of lectures at Oxford.

Gopnik refuses to dismiss Chesterton, even though he thinks his beliefs (localism, Catholicism) would eventually lead most people to intolerance and authoritarianism. Chesterton’s personality was too genial, his love of life too infectious, his mystical appreciation of reality too profound, his aphorisms too funny. But those of us who have come to share Chesterton’s ‘conversion sickness’, and who can admire without idolizing him, need to demonstrate both by words and by deeds that faith is more than a mood, and that it leads in a direction even the sceptics of the New Yorker need have no reason to fear.

Which brings us back to World Youth Day. Read the Pope’s wonderful addresses to young people here.

Read what our young people are doing on the World Youth Day blog.

Baby at 10 weeks old

With the recent fertility and embryology legislation in Britain, Britain has proved itself once again in the vanguard of the culture of death. This was a cluster bomb of devatating decisions, hotly contested in parliament and in the media. The upper limit for legal abortions was kept at 24 weeks despite a popular campaign to reduce it, the need for a legal father was dispensed with, animal-human hybrids approved for medical experimentation - it was an all-out assault on traditional notions of the family and human identity.

The Archbishop of Birmingham summed it all up: ‘On the night of Tuesday, May 20 the House of Commons refused to change the 24-week limit on abortions. Not even the vivid pictures of a human being stretching, yawning and smiling in the womb convinced the majority of a need for change. So the deliberate killing and dismembering of innocent human beings will continue. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of NHS doctors refuse to carry out such abortions. They are left to the profit-making private sector. A brutal reality in a brutal world. The Government’s argument in favour of these abortions was based on scientific evidence. Its logic is clear: if a baby is not viable outside the womb, it may be killed. Nothing else matters. Earlier, on Monday evening, Parliament extended its 1990 decision that a human life, in its first 14 days, in limited circumstances such as IVF, could be created, used and destroyed for the benefit of others. Now it will be legal for human life in its earliest stages to be subjected to a wide range of selective testing, experimentation and intermixing with animal DNA, eggs and sperm.’ Another bishop has spoken of the way Britain has now moved from a post-Christian to a post-human era.

For a detailed and intelligent look at bioethical issues, take a look at the articles on the site of the Linacre Centre, and for the ethics specifically of human-animal hybrids, read David Albert Jones. Austen Ivereigh’s coverage of the recent parliamentary debate on Godspy has also been helpful. Among other things, he mentions that the lowering of the age for viability of the embryo puts science and popular opinion increasingly on the side of a lower limit for abortion, with the politicians on the back foot. This is a point worth exploring further. It is sometimes said that the Catholic Church pits faith against reason in the embryo debate. But it was advances in science that first persuaded the Church to abandon the assumption that human life begins only when the unborn child begins to kick. It was science that made it clear that a new human life can be traced back to the very first moments of fertilization. Now it seems likely that before long it may be possible to develop an artificial womb, so that an embryo could be carried to term outside a woman’s body altogether. Whatever we think about that as a procedure, it essentially means that a foetus is potentially ‘viable’ outside the mother from the very beginning. At that point a major part of the pro-abortion argument collapses completely.

Philosophy is not just for specialists. All of us (including newspaper headline-writers) have a philosophy, even if it is unexamined and incoherent. We need to become more conscious of our assumptions and where they come from. And we should not be content with basing our moral decisions on convenience or emotion. That is why the late Pope John Paul II wrote one of his greatest encyclicals, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) on the importance of philosophy. It seems to me that modern campaigns against whole categories of human life, whether Jews or embryos, became possible largely thanks to a philosophical revolution back in the 14th century. Sweeping aside the common-sense realism of St Thomas and his predecessors, the new “Nominalist” philosophers in places like Oxford taught that the word “human” is only a label. Does a blob of cells in the womb, or a slave, or a member of another race count as “one of us”? Not if we need a convenient source of stem cells, or someone to do the dirty work, or a scapegoat for our troubles.

As Bishop O’Donoghue said recently, ‘From the moment of conception the unborn human being is genetically unique from his or her mother and father. The unborn child is a completely new and different living being. During the 19th century, slavers said black people weren’t human. They were wrong. During the 20th century, the Nazis said the Jews weren’t human. They were wrong. Since 1967, the House of Commons has said the unborn are not human. They, too, are wrong.’

I realize philosophical debate is not going to carry the day, but sometimes it helps to know what we are up against. For more on the practical prolife work being done in Britain see SPUC and LIFE - not forgetting the Sisters of the Gospel of Life in Scotland.

There is currently a petition being sent to her Majesty the Queen. It reads:

21st May 2008

Your Majesty,

For the defence of your most vulnerable subjects, for the future of the Realm, can I beg Your Majesty not to give Royal Assent to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

By legalising animal-human hybrids, the Bill disregards the distinction between man and other animals. In this it denies our immortal soul.

By legalising the creation of saviour siblings, the Bill proclaims that man and science can deliver us from suffering even by violating fundamental ethical norms such as no person is to be used (or created) as a means to somebody else’s end.

By allowing the creation of fatherless children the Bill enshrines an extreme rejection of the Father. Fatherhood is intrinsic to life, encoded in the deepest reality not only of creation but first of the uncreated Trinity.

By resisting all attempts to lower the upper limit for abortions from 24 weeks the Bill proves itself to be against God’s own gift to us: life itself.

Your Majesty is the only person in the world with the temporal power to prevent this Bill from becoming an Act. Please help us.

Fr Aidan Nichols, OP, wrote of your Coronation: “Taking the orb, surmounted by the cross, [the Queen] was reminded that “the whole world is subject to the power and empire of Christ our Redeemer;The sceptre, the supreme symbol of royal power, the ensign of kingly power and justice, was handed over simultaneously with the dove-headed rod, as a sign that justice and mercy are never to be put asunder.”"

In this Fr Nichols gives your subjects tremendous hope that whenever Parliament fails grievously, our monarch may protect us from evil. Please defend us.

Yours most sincerely,

James Mawdsley and The Undersigned

From Saturday 17 May 2008, items from the G.K. Chesterton Library will be part of an unprecedented exhibition of the Art of GKC in Oxford. The exhibition will be open to the public for two weeks only. [It has since been extended for another week, until Saturday 7 June.]

We think of him as a man of letters, a journalist, philosopher-at-large, playwright, detective story writer, apologist, but Gilbert Chesterton as a young man studied painting and drawing at the Slade, part of the University of London. From an early age he showed a huge natural talent. Aidan Mackey, who created the Chesterton Library, has an example of his skill from the age of seven. Other items in the collection include pencil sketches, numerous drawings in the margins of his books, published book illustrations, and a multitude of figures and backdrops from a large toy theatre he made to entertain the local children in Beaconsfield.

Opening times can be found on the new Art Jericho web-site. Do come if you can, and invite others to drop by.

Named after Jericho, the district in Oxford where the building can be found, the new gallery will later host other exhibitions and seminars, slideshows and talks, some in association with the Centre for Faith & Culture, located upstairs in the same building (at 6a King Street).

Acquired last year by the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in New Hampshire to develop its Oxford programme, for the last ten years the Centre has been the custodian of the Chesterton Library, some of that time with the generous support of the G.K. Chesterton Institute at Seton Hall University. Numerous researchers have come to do research in the archive (and no doubt also to try on his hat and sit on his chair, since the collection contains many unique personal items of Chesterton’s on permanent loan from the British Library). Apart from its Chesterton-related work, and the hosting of American students, the Centre edits and publishes the international journal Second Spring, and will soon be launching a book imprint for Thomas More College called “Second Spring Publications”.

UK subscribers can now find Second Spring on the brand-new CTS web-site.

There are well over a billion living Catholics. What do they believe? What is the Catholic Church? In recent years there has been a wave of great apologetic writing, much of it by former Evangelicals, aiming to explain and defend Catholic beliefs, but relatively few of those books are directed at complete outsiders to Christianity. Leonie Caldecott’s new book was commissioned by the secular publishing house Granta as part of a series that aims to introduce the beliefs of different communities to each other. It pays particular attention to those aspects of the faith which make Catholicism distinctive, including the doctrine of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, and the saints, especially Mary.  She also emphasizes the importance to Catholics of a sense of the history of their Church (in both its positive and negative aspects) traceable back to St Peter, the first Pope, and the central role of the Papacy ever since, and she looks at the challenges the faith has to confront in the twenty-first century.

Leonie Caldecott is co-founder of the Centre for Faith and Culture in Oxford, and of the journal Second Spring.

I wonder how frequently these three words are put together. Yet Lent and Easter are about all of them. LITURGY because this is the sacred season at the heart of the Church’s year (more so even than Christmas), in which we prepare for and then celebrate the overcoming of death by our Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross and in the Tomb. On Holy Thursday we celebrate the Last Supper, the first Mass, and on Good Friday the sacrifice which that Mass anticipated. The Easter mysteries are cosmic mysteries, as the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck based on the Book of Revelation hints. The whole of creation is involved, implicated, and transformed by what happens here. Heaven and earth are brought into a new relation.

SEX is involved because Christ’s Passion on the Cross is a ‘nuptial’ act, the act of the cosmic Bridegroom giving his body to and for the Bride, so that she might be made fruitful and bear many children. The male gender of the priest is surely something to do with this, because God is nothing if not sensitive to symbolism.  The mystery of the Mass has the same root as marriage, a mystery of complementarity which is written into the essence of human nature. As I argued in an article called ‘Liturgy and Trinity’, the crisis over sexuality in the Church, brought into the open by the reaction to Humanae Vitae in 1968, ’stems from the mentality that fails to understand the true nature of the “asymmetric” relationship between man and woman. This is the same mentality that fails to understand the relationship between priest and people in the liturgy. This failure may express itself either in a clerical domination of the laity, or in a reversal of that relationship that eliminates all sense of the transcendent. On the one side, we find a poisonous cocktail of clericalism, aestheticism and misogyny. On the other, we observe “politically correct” liturgies devoted to the themes of justice and peace: everyone sitting in a circle, praying for the homeless and passing the consecrated chalice from hand to hand, with the priest improvising parts of the eucharistic prayer in order to make it more relevant and friendly.’

ECONOMICS is involved because the Church’s social teaching has the same root. It is all about love and gift, about our dependence upon each other to cultivate the common goods of the earth. As Pope Benedict stressed in Deus Caritas Est, and willl again in the forthcoming Social Encyclical, it is the task of the lay faithful, animated by charity, to shape a society and social structures that serve the good of the human person. The person is intrinsically related to others and to the natural environment, to past and future generations, and cannot be understood in isolation. Therefore an ecological perspective as well as an economic and political one flows from the Easter liturgy, which ‘fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling’ (Gaudium et Spes, 22).

Here at Second Spring, which is the adopted journal of Thomas More College and its Center for Faith and Culture in Oxford, we are trying to encourage and develop new expressions of the Christian Humanist tradition that lies behind the foundation of the College thirty years ago this year. The latest issue of the journal, issue 9, is devoted to the ‘Genius of Woman‘ and features all women authors. The phrase we used as a title was a favourite of Pope John Paul II, and his ‘new feminism’ is the inspiration of the issue, which started with a conference we ran in Oxford a few years ago as part of a series unpacking the Pope’s legacy.

As Carol Zaleski writes in the Introduction to the issue, ‘What woman wants, according to JPII, is to be truly herself: to live out her specific genius for loving and being loved, to find herself by giving herself to others [as all of us do]. In this issue a group of Catholic women meditate on what this mystery, this genius, this vocation of being woman is all about. As they make clear, the “genius of woman” is not a mere gallantry on John Paul’s part, nor a self-eulogism on our own, but a concrete and practical idea full of implications for the way individual women negotiate the demands of daily life.’

The issue is more tightly focused than we usually have been on one specific theme, but it explores that theme as usual in the spirit of creative fidelity to the Catholic and Christian humanist tradition, of which the philosopher-pope was an eminent representative. We hope you enjoy it, and we would encourage you to engage with us in a discussion of the theme elsewhere on our web site. There are many divisions within the Church, and that between feminists and anti-feminists is one of them. Our approach is to try to avoid polemic and division, not by compromise on any significant issue, since we do have our own editorial line, but by looking for the truth that transcends and the friendship that unites people who may, at the level of ideas, be quite opposed.

In a very different context, in his Moto Propriu relaxing restrictions on the use of the 1962 Missal, Pope Benedict XVI has expressed this spirit most succinctly as follows:

‘I now come to the positive reason which motivated my decision to issue this Motu Proprio updating that of 1988. It is a matter of coming to an interior reconciliation in the heart of the Church. Looking back over the past, to the divisions which in the course of the centuries have rent the Body of Christ, one continually has the impression that, at critical moments when divisions were coming about, not enough was done by the Church’s leaders to maintain or regain reconciliation and unity. One has the impression that omissions on the part of the Church have had their share of blame for the fact that these divisions were able to harden. This glance at the past imposes an obligation on us today: to make every effort to unable for all those who truly desire unity to remain in that unity or to attain it anew. I think of a sentence in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, where Paul writes: “Our mouth is open to you, Corinthians; our heart is wide. You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your own affections. In return … widen your hearts also!” (2 Cor 6:11-13). Paul was certainly speaking in another context, but his exhortation can and must touch us too, precisely on this subject. Let us generously open our hearts and make room for everything that the faith itself allows.’

A personal God governs the stars

What was the star the wise men saw in the East? (The story can be found at Matt. 2:1-12.) Some say it was the symbolically highly appropriate conjunction of Jupiter and Venus (Kingship and Love) on 17 June in 2 BC, when Jesus may have been two years old. The dates work less well if Jesus was born in 6 BC and Herod died two years after that, as the standard chronology suggests. Besides, how do we explain the part of the account that says the star ‘went before them’ and ‘came to rest over the place where the child was’? It seems that Matthew was less interested in astrology than in showing the fulfilment of ancient prophecies and correspondences - a theme that runs right through his Gospel. Jesus was the new Moses, the new David. So the phrase ‘went before them’ is meant to recall the book of Exodus, when in order to lead the Israelites out of Egypt the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night ‘went before them’ to ‘lead them along the way’ to the Red Sea (Ex. 13:17-22). This pillar is the manifestation of the Lord’s presence, an angel sent to guide the people. Matthew is telling us that the ’star of Bethlehem’ is essentially an angel. Immediately afterwards, in Matthew’s account, Joseph is asked to take the Holy Family into Egypt to keep them safe from Herod. This reinforces the association with Exodus. Thus the child Jesus is kept safe, for a time, in Egypt, just as Moses was kept safe by the Egyptian princess from that other ‘massacre of the infants’ initiated by Pharaoh, until the time came for him to take up his destiny. And then again, immediately after the return of the Holy Family from Egypt in Matthew’s account, we find the preaching of John the Baptist, and the baptism of Jesus in the waters of Jordan, the new ‘crossing of the Red Sea’, signifying the way in which the mature Jesus will lead his people through the sacrament of Baptism to their liberation from sin and death.

In his encyclical letter Spe Salvi, on Hope, Pope Benedict quotes St Gregory Nazianzen. “He says that at the very moment when the Magi, guided by the star, adored Christ the new king, astrology came to an end, because the stars were now moving in the orbit determined by Christ.” This means that “within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus has revealed himself as Love.”

The staff at Second Spring wish all our readers a happy and blessed new year!

The Pope’s Spe Salvi shows us Christ, the good shepherd, the true philosopher, who ‘tells us who man truly is and what a man must do in order to be truly human.’ He shows us ‘the way beyond death; only someone able to do this is a true teacher of life.’ The Pope integrates spirituality with metaphysics in his extraordinary analysis of how faith is truly the ’substance’ of what we hope for, in the sense of a real basis for a new existence.

In this Information Age, the Pope reminds us that the Gospel is not mere ‘information’ that can be filed away, any more than the sacrament of Baptism is just a way of inducting someone into a society where they can carry on being as they were before. Faith gives eternal life. But, he asks, do we want that eternal life? ‘In some way we want life itself, true life, untouched even by death; yet at the same time we do not know the thing towards which we feel driven. We cannot stop reaching out for it, and yet we know that all we can experience or accomplish is not what we yearn for. This unknown “thing” is the true “hope” which drives us, and at the same time the fact that it is unknown is the cause of all forms of despair and also of all efforts, whether positive or destructive, directed towards worldly authenticity and human authenticity. The term “eternal life” is intended to give a name to this known “unknown.”

‘Inevitably it is an inadequate term that creates confusion. “Eternal,” in fact, suggests to us the idea of something interminable, and this frightens us; “life” makes us think of the life that we know and love and do not want to lose, even though very often it brings more toil than satisfaction, so that while on the one hand we desire it, on the other hand we do not want it. To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality - this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time - “the before and after” - no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy.’

Life in this full sense is the opposite of self-centred or self-enclosed. It ‘presupposes that we escape from the prison of our “I,” because only in the openness of this universal subject does our gaze open out to the source of joy, to love itself - to God.’ Yet the Pope is aware that the opposite impression is often given. He asks: ‘how did we come to conceive the Christian project as a selfish search for salvation which rejects the idea of serving others?’ In order to answer this question, he has to analyse the foundations of the modern age, and the process by which faith in God was replaced by faith in progress.

What better way to begin the new year than by studying this wonderful encyclical!

‘It is important to know that I can always continue to hope, even if in my own life, or the historical period in which I am living, there seems to be nothing left to hope for. Only the great certitude of hope that my own life and history in general, despite all failures, are held firm by the indestructible power of Love, and that this gives them their meaning and importance, only this kind of hope can then give the courage to act and to persevere… We can open ourselves and the world and allow God to enter: we can open ourselves to truth, to love, to what is good…. We can free our life and the world from the poisons and contaminations that could destroy the present and the future. We can uncover the sources of creation and keep them unsullied, and in this way we can make a right use of creation, which comes to us as a gift, according to its intrinsic requirements and ultimate purpose. This makes sense even if outwardly we achieve nothing or seem powerless in the face of overwhelming hostile forces.’

Stratford Caldecott