A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a woman who works in an advocacy role for Muslim women in an area that, quite independently of the Bishop of Rochester, she described as a ‘no-go area’ for non-Muslims. Her clients were women in the process of being sectioned into mental health units in the NHS. This woman, who for obvious reasons begged not to be identified, told me: ‘The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn’t want. Or maybe she starts wearing western clothes.There can be many reasons. The women are sent for asssessment to a hospital. The GP referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned. She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don’t you people write about this?’
Convert England to Catholicism
One of Britainâ??s leading theologians has broken ranks with the ecumenical establishment by calling for Catholics to convert non-Catholics. Fr Aidan Nichols, the English theologian most closely associated with the thinking of Benedict XVI, has appealed for England to be â??re-madeâ?? as a Catholic country.
He set out his radical and comprehensive programme for Catholic renewal in a new book entitled The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England, published by Family Publications.
In his preface he says that Catholic Christianity should be put forward â??not as an occupation for individuals in their solitude but as a form for the public life of society in its overall integrityâ??. He admits that the conversion of England is â??an absolutely colossal agendaâ??, adding: â??It can only be brought into being, so far as it depends on us to do so, by a coordinated strategy for recreating a full-blooded catholicity with the power to… transform a culture in all its principal dimensions.
Fr Aidan Nichols’s plan for renewal:
Firmer doctrine in our teaching and preaching
Re-enchant the liturgy
Recover the insights of metaphysics
Renew Christian political thought
Revive family life
Resacralise art and architecture
Put a new emphasis on monastic life
Strengthen pro-life rhetoric
Recover a Catholic reading of the Bible
Catholic Herald Convert England to Catholicism
On the articles page at Anglican Use, see Nichols ‘Anglican Uniatism’ (largePDF)
Aidan Nichols
Damian Thompson’s readers’ choice for Cardinal after Cormac Murphy-O’Connor?
It’s Aidan Nichols, the UK’s most published theologian, presently at Blackfriars Oxford
It is time someone took the Christendom Awake website in hand, by the way.
Partnership, but not at the cost of religious identity
Groups like Catholic Charities do accept government funds, which they then pass through to the needy. In fact, one of the main reasons governments use nonprofits like Catholic Charities is because theyâ??re cost-effective. As a result, government gets much more for its dollar by working through Catholic Charities to reach the poor. But administering the support personnel, ministries and distribution of funds does cost money, and a portion of government money is retained to help pay expenses, including in some cases salaries. This is necessary. Itâ??s also fair and reasonable.
What I hope Catholics and the wider community clearly understand about HB 1080 is this: Catholic organizations like Catholic Charities are glad to partner with the government and eager to work cooperatively with anyone of good will. But not at the cost of their religious identity. Government certainly has the right and the power to develop its own delivery system for human services. But if groups like Catholic Charities carry part of societyâ??s weight, then itâ??s only reasonable and just that they be allowed to be truly â??Catholicâ?? â?? or they cannot serve. And that has cost implications that the public might prudently consider in reflecting on HB 1080.
Finally and quite candidly, one of the Catholic communityâ??s deepest concerns in regard to HB 1080 is the billâ??s source. Iâ??ve heard from quite a few Catholics over the past week; Catholics who find HB 1080 offensive, implicitly bigoted, and designed to bully religious groups out of the public square.
Archbishop Chaput How to write a really bad bill
Christodoulos
Orthodoxwiki tells us about Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens and Primate of Greece who died this week.
Wikipedia gives plenty of detail on the public impact Christodoulos made.
Christodoulos opposed the decision to remove the ‘Religion’ field from national ID cards, seeing as part of a wider plan to marginalise the Church from Greek public life and stating that the decision was “put forward by neo-intellectuals who want to attack us like rabid dogs and tear at our flesh”
In 2004 the Archbishop criticized globalisation as a “bulldozer that is out to demolish everything, on account of those who want to rule the world without resistance or obstacles” adding that Greeks live in a paradise compared to other Europeans, because “they have a strong faith, they build churches, follow traditions, and resist globalisation”.
On another occasion he stated that “the forces of Darkness cannot stand it [that Greece is a predominantly Orthodox country], and for this reason they want to decapitate it and flatten everything, by means of globalisation, the novel deity
Give us another like Christodoulos.
Collaboration between some bishops and the state security agencies
Long since the Moscow Patriarchate defrocked Father Gleb Yakunin, a Moscow priest who, as an elected deputy in 1990, had privileged access to the KGB archives and discovered that the collaboration between some bishops and the state security agencies had been worse than even he had imagined. The Church has never properly investigated this, clearly because so many of the bishops, not least the Patriarch, rose to power with the say-so of state authority.
Sometimes it is the local bishop who acts as an agent of secular power. Father Sergei Taratukhin was imprisoned in the 1980s as a Soviet-era dissident. In prison he became a believer, trained for the priesthood and became chaplain in Penal Colony No10, near Chita in eastern Siberia. He served there seven years, befriending an inmate, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, condemned by a Moscow court in 2005 for financial misdemeanours in a trial widely seen as politically motivated.
Taratukhin became convinced that Khodorkovsky was a political prisoner and campaigned for him. Bishop Yevstafy, his diocesan, intervened and removed him to a remote parish. Taratukhin objected, so his bishop defrocked him. Now the priest has appeared abjectly contrite on TV, in a scene reminiscent of clergy who recanted their anti-Soviet activities in former days. The bishop has offered him forgiveness and partial reinstatement – he now organises rubbish collection and shovels snow from the paths around Chita’s new cathedral.
Michael Bourdeaux Putin and the Patriarchs
No access to Jordan
No immersion in the waters of the Jordan River this year for Orthodox believers who gathered on its shores to celebrate the Feast Day of the Baptism of Jesus. They were prevented by Israeli security forces.
Several thousands of pilgrims were able never the less to take part in a prayer service celebrated by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem Theophilus III at the Qasr el-Yahud Monastery dedicated to St John the Baptist on the west bank of the river, a site which the Israelis closed at the start of the second Intifada in 2000 and have generally kept off limits ever since. Even on this exceptional occasion Israeli soldiers were all over the place.
At the end of the ceremony the faithful walked in procession to the river bank where according to tradition Jesus was baptised.
Theology of the Body in London
Professor Janet E. Smith
Sacred Heart Major Seminary
Thursday 6th March Westminster Cathedral Hall London 7-9pm.
Neamtu now unstoppable
Congratulations to Dr Mihail Neamtu, whose ‘The Nicene Christ and Desert Eschatology‘ has been accepted by the University of London for the degree of PhD.
Already a fellow of New Europe College in Bucharest, Mihail will soon be visiting fellow at the University of Notre Dame. And did you know that he has his own wikipedia entry? He organises some good conferences too.
I hope I achieve all this before I reach thirty.
Providence
The Providence conference at Aberdeen was just as wonderful as anticipated. Though there were seventeen speakers, it was a comparatively small affair, and thanks to Francesca Murphy’s amazing powers of organisation and hospitality it was all most relaxed and convivial. Champions of wildly contrasting approaches chuntered happily away at every interval and supper.
Trouble is, I suppose, that it was wonderful because it was small, and it was small because so few folk from other British universities appeared, presumably because they had decided that Aberdeen was too far to go. But as Stephen Webb pointed out, only Brits would think that the journey to Aberdeen was long: Americans would consider that just a local journey .
Of the speakers, I was impressed by Charles Matthews, Stephen Webb and Philip Ziegler for extremely articulate accounts of the doctrine of providence in public theology. I particularly enjoyed talking to Matthew Levering, Hans Reinders, David Hart, Don Wood, Andy McGowan, Scott Prather, James Merrick and as ever Brian Brock.
I got drafted in to do a paper at the last minute. Here it is.
