No: the shocking thing about that photo is that Benedict XVI, the greatest Catholic theologian of the 20th century as well as a revered pontiff, is being loaded into a white van. OK, so it’s an undertaker’s vehicle, and everyone is behaving with due reverence, but what was the Vatican thinking? The optics are terrible: Benedict looks like a piece of furniture. It’s hard to escape the suspicion that Pope Francis’s staff didn’t think Benedict merited a ceremonial hearse. At the Requiem Mass, Francis preached a homily in which he mentioned his predecessor’s name only once, and couldn’t be bothered to attend the interment in the crypt. Even the Vatican correspondent Robert Mickens, a veteran critic of Benedict’s, wrote that the Pope Emeritus “deserved better”. Cardinals from around the world were horrified.

Now Francis is paying the price. No sooner was Benedict in his grave than we felt the first tremors of an earthquake that threatens to bury his successor alive. The Catholic civil war has entered a new phase. The Pope has been accused by his enemies of favouring heretics, foul-mouthed outbursts of temper, sucking up to dictators, sadistic manoeuvres against traditionalists, perverting the course of justice, a feeble grasp of Catholic doctrine and — not for the first time — of protecting a sex abuser. Catholic conservatives had been worried for years that when the ancient ex-pope finally died, Francis would be free to pursue his own agenda. For nearly 10 years he stopped short of formally changing Catholic teaching on divorce and homosexuality, restricting himself to giving a nudge and a wink to hardline liberals while missing no opportunity to give traditionalists a kicking.

In a development that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago, Latin Mass parishes and communities are attracting disproportionate numbers of young priests and worshippers. Some of them cultivate a fogyish, holier-than-thou manner that gets up the nose of ordinary Catholics — but most of them are breathing new life into a moribund Church. Pope Francis loathes them. In 2020, with no warning, he banned many of their Latin Masses, and according to multiple sources, at a meeting with seminarians in December he ranted against “fucking careerists who fuck up the lives of others”. In his defence, perhaps the words were less vulgar in Spanish. Then again, it’s no secret in the Curia that the air turns blue when the Vicar of Christ is displeased.

With his scholarly predecessor finally dead, the thinking went, the Argentinian Pope could really let rip. And so his conservative critics decided to get their revenge in first. Benedict’s private secretary Archbishop Georg Gänswein landed a blow within hours of his boss’s death. The ex-pope, he said, was “heartbroken” by Francis’s Latin Mass ban, and no wonder: it was Benedict who reintroduced the old liturgies in his 2007 apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum. On January 12, Gänswein rushed out a book, Nothing But the Truth, which claimed that Benedict thought Francis had misrepresented his reasons for issuing the document. It also hinted that he felt his successor was adopting a dangerously careless approach to Catholic teaching on sexuality.

In the same week came more bombshells. To the anguish of the Church’s conservative wing, Cardinal George Pell, former head of Vatican finances, died suddenly after a routine operation on January 10. A few hours later, The Spectator published an article by Pell that tore mercilessly into Pope Francis’s pet project, a forthcoming “Synod on Synodality” whose agenda has been dictated by liberal Catholics who support women’s ordination and are obsessed with placating the LGBT+ lobby. Pell said the synod was shaping up to be a “toxic nightmare” and poured scorn on the working document’s “neo-Marxist jargon”.

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The torment of Pope Benedict

By Damian Thompson

Never before had the Australian cardinal expressed himself so bluntly — or so it seemed, until the celebrated Vatican mischief-maker Sandro Magister revealed that Pell was the author of a memo, signed “Demos”, that circulated among cardinals last year. And “blunt” doesn’t begin to describe the language Pell used when writing under a pseudonym. The cardinal — once one of Francis’s closest advisers — described this pontificate as “a disaster in many or most respects; a catastrophe”. He accused the Pope of remaining silent in the face of “heretical” voices calling for the scrapping of the Church’s ban on women priests and gay sex, while encouraging “the active persecution of traditionalists” and writing papal documents that marked an intellectual “decline” from the standards of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Pell warned his fellow cardinals that the Church was heading towards bankruptcy. He accused the Pope of turning the Vatican’s trial of Cardinal Angelo Becciu and other defendants on massive corruption charges into “an international scandal” by shifting the legal goalposts. That was a typical Pell touch: although Becciu had been his arch-enemy in the Curia, he had himself been the victim of a grotesque miscarriage of justice when he was jailed in Australia on false charges of sex abuse, and he did not want to see a fellow cardinal denied “due process”. The memo mentioned the regular phone-tapping that frightens everyone in the Curia, Francis’s habit of ruling through decrees that allow no appeals, and the Vatican’s betrayal of Chinese and Ukrainian Catholics. “The Holy Father has little support among seminarians and young priests,” it added.

Pell would have been amused to watch Francis’s dwindling band of admirers jump like scalded cats when the authorship of the Demos memo was revealed. Given that he had died the day before, they couldn’t savage his memory; nor could they challenge the damningly precise detail in the memo; and perhaps some of them realised that George Pell had never been a traditionalist and, when Francis was elected, had believed that he might be the right man for the job. His despair came from his personal dealings with the Pope, whom he came to regard as devious but dithering and, worse, not fully committed to the Catholic faith.

And then it looked as if another bombshell had landed. On January 20, Benedict XVI spoke from beyond the grave in his final book, What is Christianity?, which he hadn’t wanted published during his lifetime because anything he said provoked hysteria from German liberals. Would Joseph Ratzinger finally settle scores with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who genuinely had humiliated him by trashing his ruling on the Latin Mass? The answer was no, as anyone who knew Benedict should have guessed. His book is a collection of essays, infinitely better written and, yes, more conservative than Francis’s writings — but the late Pope Emeritus would have considered it just as wrong to break his promise to show loyalty to his successor after his death as before it. So, nothing to see here, then.

But try looking somewhere else, to a book by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, appointed Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Benedict and sacked without warning or explanation by Francis in 2017. Müller, a moderate conservative with liberal friends who seemed like a bridge between the two pontificates, was understandably furious. Recently he has criticised the theological incoherence of this pontificate. On January 27, a book-length interview with Müller entitled In Good Faith was published in Italy. In it, the 75-year-old German cardinal sailed closer to the wind than Pell ever did under his own name. Pope Francis, he said, surrounds himself with “a kind of magic circle… composed of people who, in my opinion, are not prepared theologically”. Papal reforms of the Curia were a disaster, reducing it to “a business that works to provide assistance to ‘clients’, the episcopal conferences, as if it were a multinational enterprise and no longer an ecclesial body”.

Suggested reading

Catholics for clout

By Ann Manov

What makes Müller’s interview so deadly for Francis, however, is that it is the first time that a cardinal has drawn attention to the Pope’s favouritism towards clergy who have been accused of sex abuse. Müller mentions the “special status” given to Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, an Argentinian protégé of Francis whom he made a bishop as soon he became pope. In 2017, Zanchetta had to resign from his diocese of Orán amid allegations of abusing seminarians and financial mismanagement. Francis promptly created a job for Zanchetta in the Vatican overseeing the Holy See’s property and financial assets. This jaw-dropping appointment came to an end, however, when Zanchetta was jailed in Argentina for abusing two seminarians — despite the Vatican’s mysterious refusal to supply the courts with its own investigations into the charges.

This was at least the third time Francis had stuck his neck out — and risked his reputation — to defend a Latin American ally either plausibly accused or convicted of sexual abuse. Now there are questions about what the Pope knew about another of his clergy friends — his fellow Jesuit Fr Marko Rupnik, a celebrity artist whose tacky mosaics adorn churches all over the world and in the Vatican. The Rupnik scandal beggars belief. In 2015 the Slovenian priest seduced a novice nun and then absolved her of the sin of sleeping with him in the confessional. He was convicted of this grave offence — which incurs automatic excommunication — by a church court in January 2020. But his official excommunication was not imposed until May 2020, and lifted that same month because he had repented.

In between the conviction and the official excommunication, however, Rupnik was asked to preach the Lenten homilies at the Vatican in March 2020 and Francis signed off on it. Did he really not know about Rupnik’s trial for the seduction and absolution of a novice, particularly as Rupnik had been ordered not to preach in public without permission or to hear women’s confessions as a “preliminary” measure as early as June 2019? But that’s not the worst of it. Last December, Italian websites began claiming that Rupnik was suspected of serially abusing women in the Nineties. After the reports appeared, a former religious sister gave an interview to an Italian newspaper alleging that during the Eighties and Nineties Rupnik abused half the members of a community of consecrated women he founded in Slovenia. She claimed that he demanded that she play “erotic games in his studio… while painting or after the celebration of the Eucharist or confession”. Those “games” became increasingly pornographic.

Then it emerged that in 2021 the Jesuit order had started investigating allegations by nine women, but that nothing was done because the Vatican refused to investigate them, citing its statute of limitations. In 2022, the Jesuits asked for this to be lifted because the alleged offences were so “gruesome”, but the Vatican again refused. In January 2022, Rupnik had a private meeting with Francis. We know nothing about it, but we do know that in February the Diocese of Rome posted a talk by Rupnik on Eucharistic Adoration on its YouTube channel. And for the rest of the year this celebrity priest swanned around Italy giving retreats.

Last December, the Cardinal Vicar for the Diocese of Rome, Angelo De Donatis, issued a statement claiming that Rome learned of the Rupnik allegations “only in very recent times”. It ended with the statement that his diocese was “comforted by the discernment of her Supreme Pastor”. This prompted a veteran Vatican correspondent, Christopher Altieri of Catholic World Report, to claim that De Donatis was speaking in code. “Basically, Cardinal De Donatis is telling everyone who reads and understands curialese that Pope Francis is calling the shots on this one, and that Pope Francis has Fr Rupnik’s back,” he wrote. This was just before the deaths of Benedict and Pell and the flurry of books criticising Pope Francis. Vatican-watchers forgot about the Rupnik scandal for a few days, then started asking with increasing alarm whether Francis was party to a cover-up.

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The hypocrisy of Pope Francis

By Damian Thompson

The Pope seems to have panicked. On January 24, he gave a long interview in Spanish to Nicole Winfield of the Associated Press — definitely one of the safer choices for a pontiff worried about being grilled. Francis called for homosexuality to be decriminalised everywhere, which AP justifiably ran as the headline. Winfield gushed about what a milestone this was for LGBT people, while admitting that the Pope “referred to the issue in terms of ‘sin’”. In fact, he had described homosexuality as a sin, which is not the teaching of the Catholic Church. As a result, he had to write a hasty letter to the Jesuit gay rights activist Fr James Martin explaining that he meant that all sexual acts outside marriage were sinful, though “circumstances may decrease or eliminate fault”. For his critics, it was an example of Francis at his worst: a mixture of confusion, evasion and sleight of hand.

Inevitably, both sides in the Catholic civil war slugged it out over the episode — which was embarrassing for the Pope but at least deflected attention from the very slippery answer he gave when he was asked about his friend Rupnik. To quote AP: “Francis denied he had any role in the handling of Rupnik’s case, other than to intervene procedurally to keep the second set of accusations from the nine women with the same tribunal that had heard the first.” His only decision was “let it continue with the normal court, because, if not, procedural paths are divided and everything gets muddled up”. And, he added: “So I had nothing to do with this.”

This makes no sense. As Altieri points out, you can’t simultaneously claim that you intervened in a procedural matter and had “nothing to do with this”. And then there’s the fundamental question of why the Vatican was so determined to scupper a Rupnik trial by invoking a statute of limitations that Francis could easily have waived. Someone in Rome needs to do some more pushing on Francis’s protection of Zanchetta and others. And here we encounter the infuriating reluctance of accredited Vatican correspondents to subject the ruler of Western Europe’s most corrupt independent state to the scrutiny that any president or prime minister would receive.

As a result, most Catholics, and even some of the cardinals who will be voting in the next conclave, don’t know the extent of the crisis. And that’s why Cardinal Pell, with a heavy heart, wrote the Demos memo. He was doing everything in his power to ensure that the next pope was an orthodox Catholic — not something previous conclaves have had to worry about, but some of the red hats Francis has doled out have landed on the heads of clerics whose views are more liberal Protestant than Catholic. Unfortunately Pell died first, reminding us that a man regarded by countless Catholics as the worst pope for centuries has one precious asset: he’s lucky.

The bishop thought about it for a bit and then replied, half-joking, half serious: “That there is no immunity from prosecution,” he said, “even when you are dead.”

One of the fundamental principles of justice is that you should get what you deserve. Immanuel Kant argued that one of the reasons he believed in life after death was that he believed the universe had to be just, and that meant wrong-doers must be punished. And given that wrong-doers are often not punished in this lifetime, there had to be some final judgment in order to keep the universe balanced for the good.

When I lived next to St Paul’s Cathedral, I could see the scales of justice from my bedroom window on top of the Old Bailey. Justice requires balance. Sin has to be paid for with punishment. It is a basic principle of law that is enshrined in the way many people understand the requirement for Jesus to be nailed to a cross.

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Why God needs skin in the game

By Giles Fraser

The argument is that humanity has sinned, and sinned to such an extent that no human punishment can be weighty enough to balance the scales. So God offers himself in the place of punishment to take the consequences of our sin, and thus right the requirements of justice. Sin requires pay-back. For many, this is the heart of the Easter story.

I have long disliked this formulation. It turns God into some sort of vicious, vindictive monster, requiring the blood sacrifice of his own child to achieve some sense of cosmic balance. Others have strongly disagreed with my conclusion, including Ian Paisley.

“What an outrageous blasphemy, that any man should write that which [Giles Fraser] has written. Remember, his words are from the lips of a so-called Protestant clergyman. To libel God Almighty as a ‘vicious God’ because He sacrificed His only Son on the Cross to make possible the freeing of sinners from the damnation of sin and hell, is the language of Satan’s vocabulary. … The whole message of the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus is that He came into the world to save sinners. There was a debt to be paid. There were sins to be erased. There was a ransom to be paid. … To decry these objectives is the howling of the beasts of hell’s pit, and the roaring of the Devil himself.”

I was reminded of Ian Paisley’s characteristically trenchant response to my opinions on the death of Jesus while interviewing the extraordinary Marina Cantacuzino last week for my Confessions podcast.

Marina is the founder of The Forgiveness Project, a charity that seeks to collect powerful stories of forgiveness, of victims and perpetrators seeking a way forward that does not involve the use of vengeance to right the scales of justice. Christianity is not the inspiration for her approach – forgiveness, she says has been “barnacled by aeons of piety”.

Why is punishment so popular?

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But I think the reverse is almost true. Christians especially may talk a good game about forgiveness, but it often does not find its way into their core doctrines – especially when it comes to understanding Easter.

Yet Cantacuzino is right, of course, that the call to forgiveness is found throughout the Bible. You may remember, back at the turn of the Millennium, that many of us were marching for the abolition of Third-World debt under the banner of Jubilee 2000. The reference to the Jubilee was a reference to a powerful tradition in the Hebrew scriptures in which prisoners are freed and debts are written off every 50 years on the Day of Atonement. The Jubilee is often referred to as “the year of the Lord’s favour”.

Here, for instance, is the first sermon Jesus gives in the Gospel of Luke. This is Jesus announcing what he is all about:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Luke, 4:18

Elsewhere, Jesus famously counters the idea that justice requires “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” – the classic definition of pay-back theology – with a call for forgiveness. As the anthropologist René Girard was to explain: the only way to draw a close to an escalating cycle of tit-for-tat vengeance is for one party not to respond in violent kind to the other. It doesn’t make sense to me that the death of Jesus has to be understood in terms of pay-back when he so clearly repudiates this very idea.

But there is no doubt that forgiveness is morally problematic, amoral even. It feels like letting people off, and a blow against the foundations of a moral society. Take Shamima Begum. Let us assume, just for the sake of argument, that she is indeed guilty of many of the crimes levelled against her.

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What Peterson shares with Pelagius

By Giles Fraser

Yes, she deserves to face justice – the justice of a British court, I believe. But what of the tradition that the demands of justice should be tempered with mercy? What of the idea that something like forgiveness should be at least a theoretical possibility? Or are her crimes really so heinous that no such possibility should ever pertain?

She must express remorse first, is one line on the Begum case. And because she hasn’t, no forgiveness can exist for her. This, of course, is just a way to withhold forgiveness, to grant it only to those who have become ‘acceptable’.

One of the reasons I am so keen on the idea of original sin – that human beings are constitutionally broken – is that it establishes some sort of solidarity among human beings as collectively fallen. Those who cannot say “there but for the grace of God go I”, suffer from a lack of imagination and self-knowledge. You are a wrong-un, as am I.

As Hamlet replies to Polonius, “Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” or – in modern English – would any of us really escape punishment if we got what we deserve? This is the reasoning that made Martin Luther come to hate the idea of a just God. Because if God is just – that is, treats us according to our merit and gives us our due – then we are all buggered. The only hope is in a forgiving God. A God of the Jubilee. And if fairness is giving people what they deserve, then what we need is a God who is not fair. This is why Christian theology is not an especially moral business.

Of course, I am not suggesting that a ‘not fair’ forgiveness is any useful basis for judicial policy. The concerns here are more existential than practical. The stories collected by Cantacuzino are beautiful and inspiring. And it is shocking, but not surprising, that some of those who have chosen to forgive are often themselves abused for having the courage to do so. They are “hated for not hating” was how Cantacuzino put it.

The Shamima Begum case has highlighted once again how collective vindictiveness can dress itself up in the language of morality. Punishment is popular. Forgiveness is not. And politicians know that.

Nietzsche had it right:

“But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice!”

Why is punishment so popular?

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Catholicism has long been seen as a special challenge, because the Roman Catholic Church is a global organisation with priests and bishops under the authority of a foreign leader. Hence the establishment of the China Patriotic Catholic Association as an organisational structure controlled by Beijing not the Vatican.

The equivalent body for Protestants is the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. The three ‘selves’ are not a reference to the Holy Trinity, but stand for self-governance, self-support and self-propagation – which, again, is all about cutting off religion in China from foreign influence.

With Xi Jinping clamping down on real and perceived sources of dissent, China’s Christians have not been spared. While the oppressive methods used to ‘re-educate’ Muslim Uighurs in China’s far west have been making headlines over here, the state is waging a much broader campaign of ideological conformity.

Further reading

He's trying, but China's Church is too big for Xi to suppress

By Jonathan Aitken

Consider the following from Jonathan Tam for Asia Dialogue:

“China continues to try to control Protestantism domestically. The official plan laid out by the China Christian Council and Three-Self Patriotic Movement on 28 March 2018 for the ‘Sinicisation of Christianity’ involves attempting to make Protestantism more patriotic and reflective of China’s history and culture over the next five years. While the general destination is set, it remains unclear what a ‘Sinicised’ form of Christianity would look like precisely.”

I’m not sure that the Chinese Communist Party is in the strongest of moral positions to preach about China’s history and culture, given how much of it they destroyed during the madness of the Cultural Revolution. It’s also worth noting that Christianity has been in China a lot longer than communism. In fact, the Church of the East reached China in the 7th century.

These days, most westerners have never heard of this ancient branch of Christianity – or else they confuse it with the Orthodox Churches of countries like Greece and Russia. It is, in fact, the result of a much earlier schism in the 5th Century, after which it spread eastwards into Persia and beyond, whereas what we think of as mainstream Christianity went broadly westwards into what was the Roman Empire.

The fortunes of these two early wings of Christianity greatly diverged – and today only a few fragments the Church of the East remain. Nevertheless, its history is a reminder that Christianity is not intrinsically western, let alone European.

That said, in more recent times, it was western missionaries who reintroduced Christianity to China. One could also argue that Protestantism is Christianity at its most western – and that its emphasis on the believer’s personal relationship with God is the spiritual foundation of western individualism and, therefore, liberalism. Of course, there are other facets to the multi-stranded Protestant tradition – for instance the strong collective identities of groups like the Amish. 

Protestantism is also organisationally and culturally adaptable. Churches that were planted in, say, Africa by starchy Victorian missionaries have remained Christian (often fiercely so) but have become thoroughly African.

The question, therefore, is not whether Chinese Protestantism will ‘Sinicise’, but whether it does so along the lines desired by the government – and which it appears increasing determined to impose.

Further reading

The dark side of China's Social Credit System

By Peter Franklin

Jonathan Tam questions whether the state can succeed. To build “a Sinicised Version of Christianity, effectively from scratch”, he says, requires both “time… and an active intellectual community”. He argues that the state does not have enough of either at its disposal:

“China does not have a monopoly over the development of a Chinese version of Christianity. There are two major competitors. The first of these are the foreign seminaries and universities in the West that are currently developing increasingly globalised and cross-cultural theologies…

“The second competitor is ethnic Chinese seminaries, the number of which is growing within the Chinese diaspora in countries like America and Canada. In addition, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore serve as Chinese intellectual hubs that maintain a fair degree of academic autonomy. As a result, the overseas Chinese have already been developing their own brand of Chinese Christianity, interlaced with their Chinese identity.”

If it can’t exert enough influence, will the government opt for outright persecution instead? We may not see Chinese Christians herded en masse into re-education camps, but policy instruments such as the Social Credit System could make life very difficult for non-conformists of whatever kind.

Perhaps Xi Jinping will look to the West for a different solution. If communism can’t check Christianity, then perhaps rampant materialism will do the job instead.

The first, perhaps surprisingly, is Antonia Fraser’s The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Rights, 1829. The clue to its pertinence is in the subtitle, however, where it mentions ‘Rights’. As A N Wilson notes in his review in The Spectator, once won, rights and freedoms are taken for granted. Today, we find it difficult, if not impossible, to imagine life before the Married Women’s Property Act, when a woman’s belongings automatically became the sole property of her husband upon marriage:

“By a similar token, the mind can scarcely take in the fact that in Penal times, Catholics could not buy or sell land; or that it was an imprisonable offence for Catholics to run a school. It was a legal offence to dress as a monk or a nun out of doors.”

The penal laws notably excluded Catholics from public life, but they extended to Protestant non-conformists too. Indeed, the term ‘non-conformist’ derived from their refusal to take the oath of adherence to the Established Church of England as required by the 1662 Act of Uniformity – specifically, to the ‘Articles of Religion’ in the new Book of Common Prayer.

No office in government could be held, nor in the church or the army, without the swearing of the oath. It was the reaction of the restored monarchy to Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector. These penal laws increased in scope after the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’, when King James II, a Catholic, attempted to re-establish the rights of Catholics. This merely precipitated his deposal in favour of the staunchly Protestant Dutch Prince William of Orange, who was married to James’s daughter Mary.

Throughout the 18th Century the laws stood on the statute books, though were ameliorated somewhat to allow Catholic recruiting for the army, especially in Ireland. An attempt to repeal them in 1780 precipitated the ‘Gordon Riots’, which resulted in huge damage in London and 300 deaths.

Parliament was, on the whole, fairly relaxed about repeal. The reluctance lay with successive monarchs: George III and George IV both felt bound by their specifically Protestant coronation oaths, and (to begin with) the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel felt as strongly.

The author tells the story with all her usual insight and style of how their ‘conversion’ came about, and how not all the opposition was based on bigotry or base motives. But the book is so much more than the history of an issue that is scarcely comprehensible in today’s liberal, secular consensus.

The book compels the reader to make the connection with the questions facing our own society over minorities – specifically religious minorities. In particular, has Secularism created such a climate of intolerance that there is now no need of penal laws – a far more insidious repression?

More essential summer reading

A book that will turn your ideas upside down

By Giles Fraser

My second suggestion for your beach bag is The Accidental President: Harry S Truman, the Bomb, and the Four Months that Changed the World (Penguin) by the American Journalist A J Baime. Truman was first an accidental vice president, an outsider from Missouri who, at the last minute, was persuaded to stand in the 1944 elections as President D Roosevelt’s running mate to garner a wider demographic vote. Truman had been in post less than three months when in April 1945 FDR died. He had greatness thrust upon him.

The enormity of the issues he had to deal with during the first four months of his presidency were, with the exception of Lincoln, the greatest any US president had faced before or has done since – notably the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the reconstruction of Europe, and the Soviet threat to the West.

Truman’s origins were among the most humble of any president, and he had no tertiary education to speak of. He had seen active service in France in the First World War as a commissioned officer in a National Guard artillery unit, however, and after the war tried a number of commercial ventures, though none proved very successful.

Through his long-term interest in the Democratic Party and a solid reputation for public administration, though, in 1934 he was elected as US senator from Missouri. But he only came to wider notice after 1941, as the highly effective chairman of the committee supervising military appropriations and contracts.

Baime tells the story of Truman’s first four months at the White House – half of which was spent at or travelling to and from Potsdam (Berlin) for the final allied conference of the war. He took the decision to use the atomic bomb to force the surrender of Japan – against much advice, including that of his chief of staff, Fleet Admiral Leahy – to save both American and Japanese lives in the invasion that would otherwise follow. He saw through Stalin at Potsdam and resolved to oppose his designs on Europe, resolving on a huge financial programme to restart the economies of both allies and defeated enemies alike (Marshall Aid’).

And what shines through the book’s intimate details of those months – all of which are fascinating – are Truman’s humanity, integrity, courage, robustness, sound sense and judgement. Beyond native intelligence, that which qualifies a man or woman for supreme leadership is their fundamental quality of character.

It is this that, looking at the world today, resonates so strongly.

More essential summer reading

Three books to explain the Summer of Populism

By Henry Olsen

He concluded his 14 minute address with a reference to a Catholic priest who died in 1955:

“Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was arguably one of the great minds, great spirits of the 20th century —a Jesuit, Roman Catholic priest, a scientist, a scholar, a mystic. In some of his writings, he said… that the discovery and harnessing of fire was one of the great scientific and technological discoveries in all of human history…

“He then went on to say that… if humanity ever captures the energy of love, it would be the second time in history that we have discovered fire.”

It is fascinating to see Teilhard’s work continue to exert an influence – and not just within a Christian context. His most famous writings occupy a space somewhere between theology, philosophy and scientific speculation. Their ambition is to fuse Christian thought with evolutionary theory. The central argument is that the universe, including humanity, is evolving through different stages of increasing complexity and consciousness towards the ‘Omega Point‘ – a state of perfect unity that draws all of existence into itself.

Further reading

Free Minds: Robert Sarah, the dissenting cardinal, seeking to save his Church

By Allan Mallinson

This is not exactly mainstream science; it’s not mainstream Catholicism either. Indeed, the church authorities stopped Father Teilhard from publishing his work during his lifetime – and, when they were published posthumously, the Church officially placed them under a monitum (a warning).

The whiff of heresy that surrounds Teilhard doesn’t put off his biggest fans, especially not those in the ever-expanding ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ category. What they might find rather more disturbing, however, is the evidence presented in an article by John P Slattery for Religion Dispatches.

Slattery presents quote after quote that show that Teilhard was a racist who believed that some ethnic groups are more advanced than others. He believed that “as not all ethnic groups have the same value, they must be dominated” though not, he added, “despised” (well thanks, Pierre, that’s mighty big of you!).

Further reading

Could genetically selective societies breed themselves into crippling uniformity?

By Peter Franklin

Furthermore, he was a eugenicist who argued that what he called the “advancing wing of humanity” should use scientific methods to further its biological evolution. Here’s another direct quote:

“We must recognize…the vital importance of a collective quest of discovery and invention no longer inspired solely by a vague delight in knowledge and power, but by the duty and the clearly-defined hope of gaining control (and so making use) of the fundamental driving forces of evolution. And with this, the urgent need for a generalized eugenics (racial no less than individual) directed, beyond all concern with economic or nutritional problems, towards a biological maturing of the human type and of the biosphere.”

Slattery is careful to put Teilhard’s most objectionable ideas within their historical context:

“…before World War II, much of the Western World was, what most of us would now regard as openly racist. Anti-Semitism, anti-blackness, anti-immigration, anti-disability, and misogyny dominated the populations of the United States and Europe. Leaders in science and industry coupled such racism with Darwin’s conception of evolutionary progress to produce horrific decades of enforced eugenic practices.”

Prominent eugenicists of that era include Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, Margaret Sanger, Sydney Webb, John Maynard Keynes, William Beveridge and Julian Huxley – all of whom are held in high regard by progressivies to this day (though not for their eugenicism). Let’s also not forget that nice, liberal, social democratic Sweden had a post-war programme of compulsory sterilisations that didn’t come to a halt until 1975.

Is this the attitude we should take to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – dismissing the bad stuff as ‘of its time’ and focusing on the good stuff?

Further reading

Don't monkey around with the borders of humanity

By Peter Franklin

No, because the ‘good stuff’ provides the basis for the bad stuff. Teilhard’s ideas have something in common with all visions of progress towards an Earthly utopia – the inherent perfectibility of humankind. That might sound like a good thing, but it allows for the idea that some people are fundamentally more advanced than others. It also implies that to make further progress, the inferior specimens have to be upgraded, bypassed or in some way dispensed with. This can be seen in Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman, the communist ideal of the New Soviet man and, of course, the Nazi belief in a master race. In a non-totalitarian form, it is there too in contemporary transhumanism and the Silicon Valley religion of the Singularity.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

It’s telling that what got Teilhard in trouble with the Catholic Church was his apparent denial of the doctrine of Original Sin. The idea that we’re all flawed (and born that way) is probably the least popular of the core Christian beliefs, but also the one for which the evidence is most glaringly obvious. It is also incompatible with Earthly utopias. If we’re all fundamentally sinful – and irredeemable except through divine grace – then there are no ‘advanced’ and ‘unadvanced’ classes of human being, and no self-propelled evolution towards perfection.

This is why Teilhard had no room for Original Sin in his philosophy. It is also why there should be no room for his philosophy in Christianity.

If I were setting the history paper for the Oxbridge entrance exam, I’d ask the question:

“What was the greater peril for the Catholic Church: the Reformation or the Second Vatican Council:?”[1. Second Vatican Council (“Vatican II” – the first had been in 1868) 21st  ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church (1962–65), announced by Pope John XXIII  in January 1959 as a means of spiritual renewal for the church and as an occasion for Christians separated from Rome to join in search for reunion]

The answer at first seems obvious: surely the Reformation, which permanently hived off a huge chunk of Catholic Christendom?

Yet a growing number of Catholics, clergy and lay, appear to think the answer might be the Second Vatican Council.

Chou En Lai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, when asked what he thought the historic impact of the French Revolution was, considered the question for a moment and replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” In truth, the story’s more complicated – the American translator said that Chou confused the Revolution with the Paris Commune – but the anecdote does make the point that history is rarely over and done with.

It’s certainly possible to make a case that the Reformation isn’t over. But it’s also possible to argue that Rome’s damage limitation exercise – including the Counter-Reformation – cured the infection, stopped its spread and allowed a significant convalescence which left the Church in better health than ever. That’s one of the pleasures of history.

On the other hand, an increasing number would argue that with the watering down – abandonment, even – of the Church’s unique claim to “Authority” (as if to Christ’s charge to St Peter, “tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam”,[2. “thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church”, (“and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”) Matthew 16:18-19] a “sed” – “but” – had been added), Vatican II introduced a bacillus to the Catholic Church’s central nervous system. 

What was the essence of Vatican II?

The argument pro Vatican II runs roughly thus: the Church is not against, not above, not apart, but in the modern world. Vatican II sought to engage, not condemn. The church, by its teaching and by its discipleship, has something to say to the world. At the same time, the world is saying something to the church.

This is Pope Francis’s position, and it is increasingly troubling a number of senior cardinals – the men who elect the pope and subsequently advise him – not least of whom is Cardinal (Robert) Sarah.

In one sense, it is difficult to characterise Cardinal Sarah as legitimately belonging in this week’s UnHerd series of free thinkers, or mavericks. Sarah, along with the other cardinals who are expressing unease with some of the things that Francis says, would argue that they were trying to be faithful to the Magisterium, which is not exclusively the pope’s dominion[3. “The task of interpreting the Word of God authentically has been entrusted solely to the magisterium of the Church, that is, to the Pope and to the college of bishops in communion with Him.” Catechism of the Catholic Church]. Indeed, they would seem to hold that in key respects, it is Francis himself who thinks and acts in an independent way.

Nevertheless, given the doctrine of papal supremacy – “the Pope enjoys, by divine institution, supreme, full, immediate, and universal power in the care of souls” (Catechism of the Catholic Church) – it is rather easier to portray dissenting cardinals as the ones who aren’t following the herd. 

Who is Cardinal Sarah?

Sarah (pronounced “Sarah”) is generally a quiet man – no propositions nailed to church doors; no gathering of kindred spirits into a following; no submissions to the pope (whether dubia – formal requests for clarification on teaching, and which imply dissent, as recently with three prominent cardinals – or, more serious, filial or fraternal corrections); indeed, his latest book is called The Power of Silence: Against the dictatorship of noise.

But in The Power of Silence, he implies that until the election of Francis, the Catholic Church had been the world’s most consistent and brightest beacon of truth on moral teachings. Indeed, many other Christians (and non-Christians) depended on the Church to promote and defend the teachings of Natural Law, the necessary foundation of civilised society (Pope John Paul II’s absolute opposition to the Soviet regime falls to mind).

But now, Sarah suggests, the Church itself is rapidly sliding into self-destructive worldliness and away from its core mandate, which is to preach the gospel in order to save souls.

Robert Sarah’s background is interesting. As ever, some use it to dismiss his views as “Third World” and therefore unsophisticated; others say it endows him with certain insight. He was born in 1945, in what was then French Guinea, of converts to Christianity from animism. He studied in various West African seminaries (it was a time of political upheaval, necessitating several moves) and in France, was ordained in 1969, and afterwards studied in Rome.

Pope John Paul made him a bishop only ten years later, and in 2001, brought him to Rome as secretary of the Congregation (department) for the Evangelisation of Peoples. On leaving Guinea, he spoke out against the government of Lansana Conté, saying that Guinean society was:

“…built on the oppression of the insignificant by the powerful, on contempt for the poor and the weak, on the cleverness of poor stewards of the public good, on the bribery and corruption of the administration and the institutions of the republic.”[4. Robert Cardinal Sarah, Nicolas Diat, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith, August 1, 2015]

Pope Benedict made him a cardinal in 2010, and in 2014 Pope Francis appointed him Prefect (head) of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments – a department central to the very being of the Church.

But then, in 2015, to his detractors Sarah was suddenly revealed as an arch-conservative. At the bishops’ synod to consider the findings of the mismanaged consultation on the family, he said that while the Church needed “to be inclusive and welcoming to all that is human”, it must still proclaim the truth in the face of two great challenges: “On the one hand, the idolatry of Western freedom; on the other, Islamic fundamentalism – atheistic secularism versus religious fanaticism.”

He has called gender ideology and ISIS the “two radicalizations” that threaten the family (thereby striking at the heart of Catholic understanding), the first through divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion; the second through child marriage, polygamy and the subjection of women.

Unsurprisingly, the remarks have made him “friends” and “enemies”. The latter gained some comfort recently when Pope Francis rejected Sarah’s call last year for priests to celebrate mass ad orientem, i.e. facing east, away from the congregation rather than west and towards. (With the substitution of the vernacular for Latin, ad occidentem was one of the most visible reforms of Vatican II.) Christopher Lamb, The Tablet’s Rome correspondent, wrote: “It is highly unusual for the Vatican to publicly slap down a Prince of the Church, yet not entirely surprising given how Cardinal Sarah has operated…”

So what does this mean for Cardinal Sarah and for the Church?

Liturgical matters – for example ad orientem vs ad occidentem – may be arcane, certainly for non-Catholics, but the sense that Pope Francis is following a false trail is not. The most recent issue arousing concern – and far greater than the form of worship, for it touches on the freedom of worship – is Francis’s rapprochement with Beijing over the appointment of bishops.

Catholics in China are divided between those in the “underground” community who recognise the Pope, and those who belong to the state-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association, whose bishops are appointed by the government. (If that sounds just rather Anglican, it’s much more sinister.) There are reports that Francis supported an offer made to two “underground” bishops to make way for government-appointed prelates, and that five government-appointed bishops have already been made valid in the eyes of the Church.

Cardinal (Joseph) Zen, until 2008 the Bishop of Hong Kong, has been outspokenly critical:

“So, do I think that the Vatican is selling out the Catholic Church in China? Yes, definitely, if they go in the direction which is obvious from all they are doing in recent years and months”.

It does not help that Bishop Sorondo, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, said on return from a visit to China last month: “Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese”.

When Pope Francis made Cardinal Sarah Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, the Catholic commentariat began speaking of him as papabile – having the quality to be made pope – but after his intervention at the synod on the family, and his “slapping down” over the ad orientem “misunderstanding”, his stock fell considerably. However, when the time comes for the election of a new pope, the Church’s internal contradictions – whether ascribable to the continuing working out of Vatican II or not – may well have reached the point where strong medicine is called for.

“At least you know where you are with Sarah” might well be the on dit in Conclave.

More on Christianity in China

He's trying, but China's Church is too big for Xi to suppress

By Jonathan Aitken

The demonstration was led by Abortion Rights Campaign member Angela Coraccio, who said the Eighth Amendment  is “an instrument of torture” and described the country’s current abortion law as “barbaric”. That gives you a pretty good flavour of the rhetoric that characterises this campaign.

The Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution was introduced in 1983 by the then PM, Garret Fitzgerald, to ensure that Ireland would give equal constitutional protection to the foetus as to the mother. Interestingly, he was from the same party as Leo Varadker, the present Taoiseach, or premier, who describes himself as pro-life but has held off from taking sides on the referendum he has called for May or June next year, just before the Pope’s planned visit to Ireland.

Back in 1983 the debate was over whether the amendment went far enough – Dana, Ireland’s former Eurovision song contest winner, led a campaign for even greater protection for the embryo/foetus. This time it’s focused on the question of whether the foetus does indeed have human rights comparable with his or her mother’s.

There has been a consultative commission to advise the Government on what might follow the repeal of the Amendment, but it was so weighted towards pro-choicers as to threaten to be a hindrance to any bid to repeal it. Essentially, its probable recommendation for the referendum is for Irish law to replicate British law in respect of abortion, but this is less likely to gain popular support from the electorate as a bid to ban abortion in extreme circumstances, for instance, after rape.

An interesting facet of the current debate is what’s absent from it. That is, the Catholic Church. The succession of child abuse scandals has largely discredited the church as a player in national politics. The most recent referendum which approved gay marriage was significant for the fact that the bishops were largely absent from public debate. The church is so traumatised by the aftershock of abuse scandals, it has effectively acknowledged that its intervention in issues like abortion  could do more harm than good.

So the onus is on lay and secular groups to articulate the case against abortion. And impressively, they have reclaimed the issue as primarily a moral issue rather than a religious one. The argument is being conducted in Ireland on the pro-life side on whether a foetus really is a human being and deserving of the protection of the law, rather than on the theological question of when a foetus is ensouled. So, although most of the anti-abortion campaigners are themselves Catholic, this campaign is being fought out on non-religious territory, as to whether pre-natal human life deserves protection.

For anyone accustomed to the circumlocutions of the abortion lobby in Britain, the outspokenness of the pro-life lobby is extraordinary: their meetings and pamplets include testimonies from people born as a result of rape or the parents of children who were diagnosed, prenatally as deserving termination, but who have since been born to delight their families. The argument is that there are thousands of people alive in Ireland as a result of its restrictive abortion laws.

The obvious argument on the other side is that this is a problem that is effectively subcontracted to a neighbouring state: Britain; last year 3,265 women who had abortions in Britain gave addresses in the Republic.

Social media is the weapon of pro-choicers and it has had the usual toxic effect. Three hotels, including the well-known Aisling,  refused to host pro life rallies, because they had become the target of pro-choice threats. I saw the effect of that targeting first hand, myself, when I spoke at an anti-abortion rally over a year ago and saw the stage occupied by three pro-abortion activists.

There’s a subsidiary debate about funding. Pro-repeal groups say that US groups fund the anti-abortionists but funding is an even more fraught issue for the pro-choice lobby – the George Soros Foundation, for instance, provided three pro abortion groups in Ireland, including Amnesty International’s Irish branch, with some $400,000.  The UN has thrown what weight it has behind the Repeal campaign.

We shall see how this plays out. The campaign to extend abortion to the Republic may seem similar to the campaign for gay marriage, but it is not: it’s far uglier. The same groups that backed the previous campaign are backing Repeal but in this case, both sides of the debate are arguing about human rights. And if the pro-life lobby wins, it will be a victory for the principle that abortion is not a religious issue but a human rights issue – for the foetus.

UPDATE: “One pro-choice group (the Abortion Rights Campaign) had to hand back $25,000 from the Soros Foundation because under Irish law you cannot receive money from abroad for political purposes. ARC could not persuade the authorities that their donation was not for a political purpose whereas Amnesty Ireland and the Irish Family Planning Association did.”