What the Archbishop of Westminster really said…

The top news story on several UK sites on Christmas morning ran as follows: the Archbishop of Westminster, knowing that his midnight Christmas mass homily would be widely reported,  had used the opportunity given to him to attack the government’s plans to introduce same-sex marriage. Christian comment on (those bits that I see of) FB and Twitter was highly critical, suggesting that – even if he happened to be right about equal marriage, which most people who took the trouble to comment seemed to think he wasn’t – to make this the central message of Christmas was totally inappropriate. All this was rather predictable; also rather predictable was the fact that the media reports were at least highly misleading, if not actually inaccurate, and that the Archbishop was not guilty of any of the things he was charged with by social media commentators. The full text of Vincent Nichols’s homily is available here; his central point is that the fact of incarnation brings earth and heaven together, a fact which means the apparently-mundane activities of daily life are charged with eternal significance. He offered three examples: our daily work is a sharing in divine creativity; love expressed in human life is an expression of the love of God; and – combining these two points – the particular love expressed in marriage is a uniquely creative act, bringing into being a new human soul. He went on to suggest that each of these points is capable of distortion by sin: work can become exploitative, and a ‘corrosive disrespect can fashion the culture of a business and put it in need of refashioning’; charity can be motivated by self-interest, not genuine love; and marriage can be distorted: the Archbishop said: Sometimes sexual expression can be without the public bond of the faithfulness of marriage and its ordering to new life. Even governments mistakenly promote such patterns of sexual intimacy as objectively to be approved and even encouraged among the young. (This was, to be clear, the complete content of his statement on marriage; there was nothing else.) Now, it is fair to say that underlying this is an assumption that marriage is ordered to procreation, and so that same-sex relationships can never be ‘marriages’, but it is not news that a Roman Catholic prelate believes this, and it is left as an underlying assumption, not a point argued for or highlighted. The direct criticism here concerns sexual activity outside of marriage, and governments are criticised for approving of and promoting that. If one wanted to link the Archbishop’s comments to a current news story, the criticism of corporate culture, particularly in the context of corporate tax avoidance and the LIBOR fixing scandal, would surely have been the obvious place to go; equal marriage just was not on his agenda. So, whence the stories of attacks and quotes about the plans being ‘shambolic’? The Archbishop gave an interview to the BBC – presumably on Christmas Eve, although this was not made explicit in any of the reports. In the interview, he was asked about the government’s plans for same-sex marriage and responded; he said, as far as I can determine, nothing that has not been said repeatedly previously by Roman Catholic – and Anglican, and Evangelical, and Muslim – leaders; the press stories that appeared on Christmas Day conflated comments made in this interview with his homily to give the impression that the theme of the homily had been criticism of government plans concerning equal marriage. The BBC story, here, leads with the interview comments, but the story focuses sufficiently on Christmas sermons to give the impression that this was the context for the comments. At one point there is a quotation in a headline ‘”Shambolic” Process’ which is immediately followed by the line, ‘Speaking in his sermon at Westminster Cathedral…’; the word ‘shambolic’ came in the interview, but this arrangement of words appears almost designed to confuse and conflate the two comments. The Guardian similarly located the interview comments within a story that discussed the content of Christmas sermons, and so invited, perhaps encouraged, readers to confuse the two. Does this matter? Yes; it was clear from my FB/Twitter feeds that people I know to be intelligent and thoughtful were misled by such reporting, which surely makes it bad reporting. A festival sermon and a press interview are very different contexts, and to imply that something said in one was in fact said in another is to mislead readers badly. It would be possible to imagine intent in all this: the press were trying to paint the Archbishop in the worst possible light; I am sure...

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‘Christmas Bells’

I heard the bells on Christmas Day Their old, familiar carols play, And wild and sweet The words repeat Of peace on earth, good-will to men! And thought how, as the day had come, The belfries of all Christendom Had rolled along The unbroken song Of peace on earth, good-will to men! Till ringing, singing on its way, The world revolved from night to day, A voice, a chime, A chant sublime Of peace on earth, good-will to men! Then from each black, accursed mouth The cannon thundered in the South, And with the sound The carols drowned Of peace on earth, good-will to men! It was as if an earthquake rent The hearth-stones of a continent, And made forlorn The households born Of peace on earth, good-will to men! And in despair I bowed my head; “There is no peace on earth,” I said; “For hate is strong, And mocks the song Of peace on earth, good-will to men!” Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail, With peace on earth, good-will to men.” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1864)   Longfellow was, of course, responding to the American Civil War in the fourth stanza; the poem is simple in structure and vocabulary; in a later generation, A.E. Housman would perfect (in my, admittedly amateur, judgement) this technique of concealing craft in simple phrasing, and so intensifying the emotional impact. For me, the closing stanza captures just the right message for this Christmas season: ‘God is not dead, nor doth he sleep; The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail…’ A merry Christmas, and a peaceful new year, to all readers of this...

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Blogging around

Just a quick set of links to some things I have been writing for other people recently. My public comments on Christmas have, this year, both happened to have a music flavour. I was rather rude about Once in Royal David’s City in discussing the question ‘Was Jesus ever naughty as a child?‘ for the Evangelical Alliance magazine Idea; by contrast, I celebrated the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl whilst writing on the Theos team blog. Off the Christmas theme, I made some comments about the role of theologians and other religious studies scholars in public debate for the blog of the Religion and the Idea of a Research University project that Cambridge is running...

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Legal and ecclesiological issues concerning same-sex marriages

Earlier this year, the Scottish government seemingly kicked its proposals for extending marriage to gay and lesbian couples into the long grass, asserting that, whilst remaining committed to the principle, it could not act further without legislative changes down south. Today, the Westminster government unveiled its proposals to accomplish the same end in England and Wales. The Scottish government’s decision looks wiser than ever. I am no lawyer, but it seems clear to me that in legislating there are two questions to be addressed: what is the desired end? and, can it be at least approximately achieved by legislation? It seems to me that the Westminster government has stumbled badly on both counts. On the first, what was the government trying to achieve? If the answer was equal status between gay/lesbian couples and heterosexual couples, then the proposals fail pretty dismally. First, the reasons given for retaining civil partnerships for GL couples, but not extending them to heterosexual couples, were at the very best specious; it was difficult not to conclude that the government had simply not considered the question, and had no good answer to it. But this leaves a deeply asymmetrical situation: gay/lesbian couples can opt for marriage or civil partnership; straight couples have only marriage. This is not ‘equality’. (It might be right – I can think of at least one plausible line of argument to justify this position, an argument based on queer theory that I have some time for – but the government’s rhetoric was not there. They said they were delivering equality; they were not.) This aside, by ducking some of the hard legislative issues, the ‘marriage’ they delivered was not equal. A same-sex marriage, under the proposals, cannot be dissolved on grounds of non-consummation; an opposite-sex marriage can. The point here is not the frequency of appeals to non-consummation (they are extremely rare, but the possibility is important for Roman Catholic practice), but the fact that, in law, ‘gay’ marriages and ‘straight’ marriages will remain different things under these proposals – just as civil partnerships and marriages were different things, conferring the same rights, before. Then we get to the attempts to negotiate the consciences of mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras, and churches. We only have the minister’s statement, not the draft bill, but if I understand what she said rightly the situation is this: Non-religious celebrants will not be allowed to distinguish between same-sex and opposite-sex marriage on grounds of conscience; National religions, except the Church of England and the Church of Wales, will be able to distinguish if they so wish; The Church of England and the Church of Wales will be required in law to so distinguish; Ministers of national religious bodies that choose to distinguish have no right of dissent; Ministers of national religious bodies that choose not to distinguish have a right of dissent; Ministers of the Church of England and the Church of Wales have no right of dissent; Congregations are required to follow the decisions of their ministers on this question. It would be unkind to Fido’s dining habits to call this a dog’s breakfast… To be as generous as possible, I reconstruct as follows: the government has assumed (wrongly) that no religious body is currently in favour of same-sex marriage; it has assumed (wrongly) that local ministers within religious bodies are presently convinced of the stance of the national body; it has assumed (wrongly) that in every religious body national bodies are able to over-rule local ministerial/congregational decisions; and it has assumed (wrongly) that local congregations inevitably acquiesce to the opinions of their minister (& that there is only one local minister, or that the local ministers share an opinion…). On the basis of these several assumptions, the government has introduced ‘safeguards’ for the ‘status quo’… …unfortunately for the government, the status they are safeguarding is very far from the status quo. The reality on each of these points is far from what is assumed, and so the provisions in the bill, at best, protect the conscientious rights of imaginary people in some fantasy world. As it is, the rights of Anglican priests who want to celebrate same-sex marriages (I can give you a personal introduction to many…) are excluded; congregations who have a residing minister who believes differently from them are unheard; the Baptist/Congregationalist denominations who locate authority in the local congregation, not in national body or local ministry, are unable to follow their religious beliefs, and, basically, almost nobody is presently happy. Was the desired end this bizarre mishmash of exclusions, compromises, and privileges? I assume not, and so must conclude that the draft bill proposed by the Westminster...

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