In so far as St Augustine of Hippo gets a press at all today, it is a bad one. In the popular imagination, he is remembered above all for his notorious prayer: “Give me chastity and continence, only not yet.” Lacking context, his plea is taken by most people as evidence of hypocrisy, but is in fact the opposite. It occurs in his Confessions, Augustine’s literary and spiritual masterpiece, which is addressed throughout to God. The fact that he confesses his self-deceit to God and man is testimony to the sincerity of his remorse. But the presumption that the pious are all hypocrites makes the opportunity to subpoena a saint against his own faith too good to miss.

Even worse, Augustine is credited with saddling Christendom with its most unfashionable doctrine: original sin. The learned sneer at him for misunderstanding the Fall, though the more charitable among them blame a faulty translation. But original sin is more generally reviled because it is supposed to have unleashed the emotion that modern psychology most abominates: guilt. What kind of monster could have believed that even innocent babies “are born sinners”? Or teach that God knows in advance who will be saved and who will not — the idea of predestination that later loomed so large in the Reformation — thereby undermining free will? No wonder Catholics have long been notorious for their exaggerated sense of guilt. It is all Augustine’s fault.

Yet here, too, the modern view does not do justice to Augustine. In more than a hundred works, he set out what has remained the orthodox teaching of the Catholic Church for 1,600 years. Free will is compatible with God’s foreknowledge, because our thoughts and actions are governed by causality. Original sin is not the fault of the newborn infant, but it is the occasion for God’s grace — proof that humanity cannot do without God and his forgiveness. For Augustine, man’s first disobedience was above all a sin of pride, when Adam and Eve sought to blame others for their actions. The Fall brought death into the world and with it the corruption of sexual desire — a subject on which Augustine wrote without prudishness. For him, the inability of men to control their lust was a consequence of Adam’s disobedience. Original sin is about human psychology, the ways in which we justify ourselves, as much as it is about theodicy, the ways in which we justify God. When Augustine converted from the teachings of Mani to those of Jesus, he also rejected fatalism, astrology and the notion of evil as an independent power. If we are evil, it is because we freely choose to do wrong.

Not only was Augustine among the first to write about the darker aspects of human nature with devastating insight, but in the Confessions he created a new genre: the first self-portrait of a mind — indeed, one of the greatest minds of all time. It is also the first depiction in words of what was then a comparatively new phenomenon — the born-again Christian — and although there have been countless autobiographies since, the Confessions has never been surpassed. We probably know more about Augustine than anybody else in the classical world. Lost works are still being rediscovered; what we know about his contemporaries — pagans, heretics or Catholics — often survives only in his tractates, sermons and polemics. No wonder Augustine has attracted many fine scholars, among whom the Princeton-based Irishman Peter Brown stands out.

Robin Lane Fox is the latest to grapple with his intractable genius: his Augustine: Conversions and Confessions (Allen Lane, £30) deals not so much with the Doctor of the Church as the drama played out in Augustine’s court of conscience, as the aspiring Catholic struggles with the despairing Manichean. What tipped the balance was his mother, Monica — a woman of sanctity and nobility. Lane Fox also illuminates the sophisticated cultural milieux of Carthage, Rome and Milan which formed Augustine’s character. As a classicist whose perspective is emphatically not a Christian one, Lane Fox shows Augustine as the last true intellectual of antiquity: as at home with philosophy and rhetoric as with theology.

But he was much more than that. After his conversion, he returned to Africa to become Bishop of Hippo. As the Roman Empire tottered, he began his “great work”, De Civitate Dei (City of God), soon after the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 and finished it around 427. Three years later, the Vandals besieged Hippo as Augustine lay dying; his cathedral and library alone miraculously survived the razing of the city.

City of God is not only the most prodigious book ever written up to that time, a vindication of Christianity against those who blamed it for the triumph of the barbarians, but also a Noah’s Ark of the mind, preserving what was needed to build a new, heavenly city on the ruins of the old. Among his legacies were the Rule that bears his name — monasticism was the bridge between ancient and medieval civilisation — and the idea of the just war. Indeed, when we justify the defence of Western civilisation against modern barbarism, we are all Augustinians.

The post St. Augustine appeared first on Standpoint.

Then came Perón. He never forgave the Jockey Club for turning him down: he, his appalling wife, and their insensate followers comprehensively wrecked the Argentine economy and all its constitutional institutions — a good example of the destructive power of anti-snobbery. The country has never recovered, oscillating between democracy and military rule, mired in bottomless corruption, and with a credit rating poisoned by endemic inflation. It is a tragedy without a mitigating feature, for the land is rich and the people, on the whole, intelligent and well-educated. Buenos Aires has the world’s biggest annual book fair, which attracts three million people, and its bohemian elegance is without rival in the southern hemisphere. But nearly all the Argentines also have a streak of noisy bellicosity which leads them to quarrel with their neighbours (and creditors), usually about trivial matters like the Falklands.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, whose parents were part of the inter-war immigration from Italy and who was born in 1936, decided to become a Jesuit in 1958. He went through their arduous 15-year training programme, becoming a priest in 1969 and making his final vows in 1973. He took degrees in Chile, Spain and Buenos Aires, and must have been an outstanding student, for he progressed rapidly from novice-master to professor, rector of the chief Jesuit college, and, in 1973, only three months after he took his final vows, was made Provincial, or head, of the Argentine Jesuits, a post he held for six years.

As Provincial he gained a reputation for ruthlessness in cracking down on the tendency of the young Jesuits to follow too literally the “option for the poor” which the Society adopted as its contribution to the spirit of the Second Vatican Council. In 1976 there was a military coup, and the junta arrested, tortured, and in some cases killed priests who had moved too far to the Left. Bergoglio was much criticised for not always doing his utmost to protect Jesuits who had fallen foul of the junta, two in particular being often cited. Both were eventually released after pressure from the Vatican itself. One left the priesthood and never forgave Bergoglio; the other was reconciled after many years. After he ceased to be Provincial, Bergoglio’s career stalled during the 1980s, by no means unusual for a high-flying Jesuit, the Society having a practice of “cutting down to size” the climbers. He was eventually rescued by the hierarchy of the Church, being made an auxiliary bishop in 1992, and thereafter progressing to full bishop, archbishop and cardinal. He was fancied as papabile during the conclave that elected the German Benedict XVI, and finally got the tiara in 2013 when pressure to elect a Third World pope became irrestistible.

Whether Bergoglio consciously wished to become pope, and deliberately sought the office, is not clear. He certainly played his cards carefully, and kept out of trouble, no easy matter in Argentina. A moderate Peronist, he avoided identification with the movement without antagonising it, a tactic he followed again with the junta, and with their various successors, including the Kirchners, husband and wife, who in turn have presided over Argentina’s rickety fortunes in recent years. Evading Madame Kirchner’s embrace is no easy matter, but he has so far — just — managed it, both before and since he became pope. The Kirchners’ family assets have increased from $2.3 million in 2003 to $18 million in 2010, the last year for which official figures are available. Since then, who knows?

As a member of the Argentine hierarchy, Pope Francis (as I shall now call him) had acquired considerable experience in sorting out financial fiddling on a large scale, and avoiding dodgy operators. He has put it to good use since he took supreme office, notably in getting (fairly) reliable people to reform the corrupt Vatican bank. He has found what looks like a trustworthy head of finance in the bluff Australian Cardinal Pell. So far, nothing too embarrassing has emerged from his own Argentine past.

Francis’s own policies, as pope, though openly and noisily on the side of the poor (whatever that may mean) do not amount to much beyond rhetoric and slogans. Trouble clearly lies ahead over marriage and morals, and my own guess is that he will not serve many years, Benedict now having made retirement an option. The truth, I suppose, is that the maintenance of the papacy as an autocratic institution, with no theoretical checks on the pope’s activity, sayings and decisions, is an anomaly which cannot last. But what will take its place? No one has any idea, and all those with power to influence change are old men.

Jimmy Burns has done a great deal of hard work and talked to many people in presenting this account of Francis and his background. He himself is Jesuit-educated and has a delightful opening chapter describing the school, Stonyhurst, which he attended. But his book has no consistent and clear chronological structure, and I found it confusing at times. The index is hopeless. Sometimes one must read between the lines to get his opinions. Still, he conveys a good deal of information and leaves the reader to make up his own mind about the Francis phenomenon.

My feeling is that one should not take  anything too seriously which comes from Argentina. I was giving a lecture to a gratifyingly packed audience in Buenos Aires, not long after the ignominious surrender of the Argentine garrison in the Falklands, and the collapse of the junta. I pointed out that had it not been for the courage and determination of Margaret Thatcher they would still be groaning under a military dictatorship. To my annoyance the audience began to titter, and was soon guffawing. I eventually realised that something comic was going on behind me. Turning, I saw that an enormous rat was making its leisurely progress across the platform. Reflecting on this afterwards, I decided that both rat and its reception were symbols of that time in Argentina.

The post When Francis Was Still Jorge appeared first on Standpoint.

Architecture was not Padre Pietro’s first vocation. Indeed, he never took any formal qualifications in the subject. Instead he joined his Franciscan order in the 1940s as a young man, straight out of school, and was ordained a priest in 1952, like his older brother before him. He chose the name “Pietro” for his ordination in honour of St Peter, the “rock” on whom Jesus built the Church.

As well as being a man of prayer, though, he was also good with his hands, as befitted the son of a ropemaker, but the limit of his building experience before 1965 had been helping out on church construction projects in Italy and North Africa.

In that year, when based with his fellow Capuchins at the Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Ambro in the Marches region of Italy, he trekked up one day to a ruined 11th-century church, dwarfed by the sheer cliff face behind it, almost 4,000 feet up in the Apennines. San Leonardo al Volubrio had once stood on trade and pilgrims’ routes, but had been abandoned as long ago as the late 16th century in favour of more accessible alternatives.

The floor, Padre Pietro recalled in his 1998 memoir Lassu sui monti (“Up There, In The Mountains”), was covered in a foot of sheep dung — it had been used as a shelter by shepherds — and only one Romanesque arch from the original design was still standing as a witness to what San Leonardo had once been. But, with as clear an eye as any architecture graduate could have mustered on a site visit, Padre Pietro saw at once a vision of what this place could be once more.

For him, its ruined altar was “a green cathedral”, the encircling mountain peaks this church’s very own spires, and the setting, a 45-minute hike from the nearest village, away from all the intrusions of the modern world, represented “a corner of paradise”.

There was also, he remembered of that first visit, a voice speaking to him. Again, it is the sort of language many creative souls routinely use, architects just as much as painters and sculptors, but for Padre Pietro it was God’s voice. “I was the workman, the operaio,” he would say, “but God was the impresario whose design I followed.”

He determined to rebuild San Leonardo. In casting it as God’s work, he was following St Francis of Assisi himself, the founder of the Franciscan order and inspiration for the present Pope. In 1206, the young Francis was praying in a dirty, derelict church at San Damiano when he heard Jesus speak to him from the cross that hung there, telling him to “restore my church”.

Francis of Assisi answered that commandment both narrowly — by rebuilding the actual church — and more broadly in initiating a revolution that returned Catholicism to its founding principles of poverty, fidelity and trust in God. Padre Pietro, however, was only concerned with San Leonardo.

Yet the challenges he faced were huge. There was the inaccessibility of the site. To get there he had to navigate a high-sided gorge known locally as “Hell’s Mouth” — “Gole dell’Infernaccio”. And he had no money for materials or workmen. God’s architect was going to have to be a solo self-builder in the manner of Channel 4’s series Grand Designs. You can almost imagine presenter Kevin McCloud filming an episode with him in the Apennines.

He would have had a long wait to broadcast it. It took this Capuchin six years to persuade his religious superiors even to let him base himself alone as a hermit at the ruined San Leonardo, a further four to detect and divert a spring onto the site to give him the water to mix cement, and a total just short of 30 years to see the church rise from the rubble and be reconsecrated by the local bishop in 2000.

The craftsmanship, design skills and ingenuity he showed in doing so were truly remarkable. Architects from their sleek glass and steel offices might point out a certain rough-hewn-ness to the finished result (to which he later added a bell tower), but that is to miss the point of a breathtaking achievement.

This is a building that one man created, stone by gleaming white recycled stone, and exerts a pull that now draws 30,000 pilgrims a year up the mountain, where it infuses them with both a sense of the splendour of God’s creation and awe at what one inspired man can achieve. By architectural standards — as by any other — that surely does merit the word spiritual.

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This in itself implies that those principles of duty or theological belief must differ in some ways from, or at least go beyond, what ordinary human reasonableness would have come up with. But there is a deeper and sharper problem here. The “liberal” view is that it is wrong to penalise people for failings which are not their own fault; good intentions and best efforts must be accepted as sufficient. Yet a human being who happens not to have been informed about the contents of divine revelation stands — if that revelation really does give the essential and otherwise unavailable key to eternal life — at a stupendous disadvantage. That people who have rejected Christianity should go to Hell may seem, at least to a believing Christian, entirely right and proper. But what about the ones who never even had a chance to accept it?

The problem raised by the idea that good pagans will burn in Hell-fire is more troubling than the other familiar problems that arise over the apparent injustice of God. There is the problem of undeserved pain and suffering in this life, for example, or the fact that we see wicked men prospering. In those cases, at least one part of the answer will be that the afflicted may be compensated in the next life, and the wrongdoers will be punished. By all means, let the wicked fry in Hell — but why should they find themselves frying alongside innocent and virtuous pagans?

The robust answer to all these questions is to say: God is simply not “fair”, if by fairness you mean the paltry and inadequate human version of that concept. God’s justice is absolute, more pure and more perfect than anything we can grasp. And it is bound up with the purpose for which He made us, which is also beyond our comprehension. How can the creature judge the Creator? Hath not the potter power over the clay?

In the Christian tradition, few thinkers have taken the robust line more robustly than Saint Augustine. Only those who believed in Jesus Christ, he declared, could be saved. Like other Fathers of the Church, he assumed that after the coming of Christ on earth the Gospel had rapidly become available to the entire human race, which meant that all post-Christ pagans were somehow guilty of rejecting the truth. For the period before Christ, Augustine allowed that God did grant miraculous prophetic knowledge of the advent of Jesus to some individuals (above all, the leading Jewish figures of the Old Testament). But whereas a more liberal-minded thinker might have used this escape-clause to claim that God had granted salvation to huge numbers of virtuous pre-Christian pagans, Augustine was scornful about the very idea that pagans could, by their own efforts, be morally good at all. Any virtues which are not animated by the love of God are, he argued, not in fact real virtues. They are self-regarding performances, tainted by pride — or, in the words popularised by a later writer in the Augustinian tradition, splendida peccata, shining or splendiferous sins.

John Marenbon’s fascinating new book on what he calls the Problem of Paganism takes Augustine’s position as its historical starting-point, and traces subsequent debates all the way to the end of the 17th century. This is much more than, and quite different from, a chronological survey of well-known arguments. While some of the thinkers discussed here (Boethius, Aquinas, Thomas More, Leibniz) are the subjects of huge modern secondary literatures, Marenbon constantly cuts across the standard discussions at a fresh angle, bringing new connections to light. This book is also no routine exercise in the history of medieval (and post-medieval) philosophy; it focuses on literary texts (Dante, Boccaccio, Langland, Chaucer), and on medieval and Renaissance works describing contacts with actual contemporary pagans. Those who know of Marenbon as a world authority on some dauntingly technical areas of medieval philosophy will be pleasantly surprised to encounter, in these pages, Peter of Dusberg’s description of pagan Prussian funerary practices, or Garcilaso de la Vega’s defence of the monotheism of the Incas, or Jean de Léry’s account of the virtues of the cannibalistic Tupí Indians of Brazil.

The long-running debate about whether pagans can be saved has attracted some historical studies in the past, of course. But Marenbon’s Problem of Paganism goes beyond the story of that theological question, embracing two other, closely related issues: whether pagans can have true virtue, and whether they can acquire true wisdom or philosophical understanding. The most liberal position would be to say “yes” to the second of these, and then, on the basis that true wisdom must include true ethics, “yes” to the first; in which case, with the help of some liberal assumptions about how and why God will grant people salvation, one can also give a “yes” to the theological question about whether pagans can go to Heaven. The relation between these three issues was seldom as straightforward as that, however. Much of the fascination of this book lies in seeing how attitudes and arguments shifted to and fro, as the pieces in this three-cornered puzzle were constantly altered and rearranged.

One thing is very clear: the hardline Augustinian position never went away. There were medieval writers who reasserted it (including some very fierce-sounding Franciscans), and in the 17th century Cornelius Jansenius, founder of the French “Jansenist” movement, would stonily insist that the virtues of the best pagans were “not true virtues, but vices hidden by the name and appearance of virtues”.

In the hands of some writers, the hard-line position became more obdurate even as it became less Augustinian. In a marvellously illuminating chapter on Dante, Marenbon points out that, far from representing a standard medieval view (as generations of readers have assumed), his treatment of the pagans is peculiarly severe. Dante does allow that pagans can have real virtue, yet still he insists that virtue is of no help in enabling pagans to avoid Hell: “I am Virgil,” says his virtuous guide, “and I have lost heaven for no other fault than not having faith.” The whole discussion of Dante here justifies Marenbon’s three-cornered approach to the “Problem of Paganism”; by studying the poet’s attitude to pagan wisdom, and placing him in a tradition of what he calls “limited relativism”, he helps us to see how it was that Dante simultaneously softened the Augustinian criticism of merely human virtue, and strengthened the distinction between the sphere of human wisdom and the sphere of faith.

Augustine’s doctrine was always present, but it was seldom a dominant orthodoxy. There were many ways of countering, evading or adapting its arguments. The great and highly original 12th-century theologian Peter Abelard laid down a path which many would follow later. His idea was that if you studied the works of ancient pagan philosophers (those, at least, that were available in the 12th century — one of whom, “Hermes Trismegistus”, was in fact much less ancient than people imagined), you could find clear hints of Christian theology, including knowledge of the Holy Trinity. To some extent, he thought, sheer unassisted human reason had been able to work out not only that there was one God (omnipotent, Creator, etc), but also that that God must have a threefold or triune identity.

As a good Christian, however, Abelard thought that only belief in the incarnated Christ could bring salvation; so he also supposed that where an ancient pagan thinker had tiptoed towards this threshold of Christian belief, God had then stepped in to bestow, by supernatural means, some prophetic knowledge of Christ’s human existence on earth.

In this way Abelard supplied later writers with not one but two very fertile ideas: the notion that valid theological knowledge did circulate among ancient pagans, and the claim that people could be turned, by a “special inspiration” from God, into Christians, long before the actual coming of Christ. (As a theoretical possibility that last idea had already been put forward by Augustine himself, whose “City of God” existed, interspersed among the human race, in all ages; but Abelard’s argument that wise pagans had reached the very threshold of Christian belief by their own efforts was deeply un-Augustinian.)

The most influential opponent of Augustine was Thomas Aquinas. His answer to the question of whether pagans could acquire real wisdom was a resounding “yes”: the towering philosophical structure which he spent a lifetime building had the teachings of Aristotle as its foundations, and the nature of the construction was meant to demonstrate a seamless transition, above a certain level, from the truths of human philosophy to the ones supplied by divine revelation.

On the issue of pagan virtue, Aquinas respected the theological principle that virtue in the full sense must be animated by the love of God, but he dismissed the Augustinian idea that pagans cannot be virtuous at all: they can indeed do “those good works for which the good of nature suffices”.

As for salvation: on this point Aquinas seems most radical of all, but, as Marenbon shows, he was simply developing a line of thought set out by previous writers. While he supposed that God might use “special inspiration” in exceptional cases (including Kaspar Hauser-like children, brought up among wolves without any human instruction), for his general solution to the problem he turned to a quite different concept: “implicit faith”. Pagan philosophers who had arrived at a basic monotheistic understanding could vow to believe whatever might be known about God by those whose knowledge was greater than theirs. In the ancient world, those superior figures were in fact the Jewish prophets, illuminated by God. But it was not necessary for pagans to meet them, or even to know who they were; a sincere belief that such people must exist was quite sufficient. The flexibility — or, if you prefer, generosity — of this argument is rather breathtaking.

All these positions, pro- and anti-Augustinian, were adopted primarily in order to argue about pagans of the ancient world, especially the most virtuous Greeks and Romans. Any interaction between these debates and discussions of contemporary pagans was quite limited, thanks to the continuing belief that, in the words of St Jerome, “no people remains which does not know the name of Jesus, and, even if they have not had a preacher, they cannot however be unaware of the faith from neighbouring peoples”. The discovery of the New World would shake that assumption to its foundations.

The last part of this book is dominated by the effects of that discovery — not just the jolt it gave to abstract knowledge, but the practical effects of a process of conquest which brought Christian governors, and Christian priests, into close contact with real live pagans. Some parts of the resulting ferment of ideas are fairly well known, such as the great mid-16th-century disputation at Valladolid between the humanist scholar and pro-conquest hardliner Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and the Dominican defender of the Amerindians, Bartolomé de las Casas. But Marenbon’s account sets them in a longer context of theological argument which few previous writers have considered in such depth. (Even so, Las Casas’s justification of human sacrifice may still take the reader by surprise.)

Marenbon’s survey of the 16th- and 17th-century debates may be a little more schematic than his searching account of the medieval arguments, but it does suffice to make one large point, which he emphasises in his conclusion: while we may think that the shift from medieval mentalities to early modern ones was a move away from rigid religious dogmas towards more human and tolerant positions, the evidence of these debates fails to support that view. There was no clear direction of “progress”, and the anti-pagan positions of some 17th-century Protestants and Jansenists were more uncompromising than those of almost any previous writers in the Augustinian tradition. Marenbon does not speculate about the reasons for this; one, surely, is the fact that “Socinianism”, from the late 16th century, and “Deism”, from the late 17th, were bugbears that genuinely frightened many mainstream theologians. Both were forms of “rational theology” (the former with a strongly biblical basis, at least to begin with, but the latter not even with that), with far-reaching implications about the power of human reason to work out what God would, or would not, do. The danger that the information provided by the Bible might turn out to be quite secondary (or even irrelevant) to human intuitions about the nature of divine justice now seemed very real, as it had never done before.

Which brings us back to revelation, and our liberal understanding of what is reasonable. It would be easy to read the story told in this book as a struggle between, on the one hand, people who were Augustinian because they were illiberal, and, on the other, their opponents, whose essentially liberal impulses drove them to find ways of accommodating virtuous pagans in the divine scheme of things. Such a portrayal would surely have been unrecognisable to the people involved. The idea that human ethical intuitions were primary, and that theological principles were secondary things, to be moulded to fit them, would have bewildered these thinkers. Today we live in a world where the expectations, and hence also the bewilderment, go in the opposite direction. That is, at the very least, another reason why we need an expert such as John Marenbon to guide us through the thinking of such a very different age.

The post The Pagan Problem In Western Thought appeared first on Standpoint.

It is said that the Duke of Norfolk, who was a retired general and “Britain’s leading Catholic layman”, had ordered the Papal Nuncio to choose Cormac. This is an over-simplification, but Cormac and Miles Norfolk had been friends and Arundel neighbours for many years.

My first encounter with the new Archbishop was perplexing. Four months into his reign, he gave away the prizes at Westminster Cathedral Choir School, where my eldest son was a chorister. WCCS parents include a high proportion of diplomats, captains of industry and politicians. The new Archbishop’s address was rambling, inconsequential, almost a music hall parody of a folksy Irish priest. Afterwards a fellow parent, the American director of a major British company, remarked that, although not himself a Catholic, he had been expecting something more enlightening from “your new guy”. So had I.

The Murphy-O’Connor family background was profoundly Irish, not rich but “with the smell of money”. The men became doctors or priests, with the exception of one in each generation who ran a wine merchant at Cork, “Dispensers of Wine and Spirits to the Clergy and Gentry of Southern Ireland”. One forebear became the first Archbishop of Hobart in Tasmania, and lived to 96. Many of the women became nuns.

Cormac’s father George was a doctor who, in 1918, bought a substantial practice at Reading. Here he and his wife, also from a well-to-do Cork family, raised a large family, sporty, musical and pious. Cormac and his brothers played rugby and were educated by the Christian Brothers at Bath, whence they returned with coarse manners that shocked their mother (she would have preferred to send them to the Jesuits at Beaumont). The family regarded themselves as English, though the connection with Ireland remained strong, and Cormac retains to this day a soft Irish accent.

Three of the boys became priests and one a British Army officer. Aged 18, Cormac went to the Venerable English College in Rome, where he developed a new Roman layer to his personality. Although bright, he says he was not in the same league as his cousin Jerome, a Dominican friar and a great New Testament scholar.

Ordained in 1956, he began his ministry as a curate in working-class parishes in and around Portsmouth. Concerned by his parishioners’ ignorance of the fundamentals of the faith, he instituted small prayer and discussion groups, an approach he would build on in later years.

Cormac’s rise to eminence began in 1966 when he was appointed secretary to the dynamic Bishop of Portsmouth Derek Worlock, a terrific operator from whom he learned much. This was during the ferment that followed the Second Vatican Council, theologically Cormac’s formative experience. In 1971 he went back to Rome as rector of the Venerable English College, where he would have encountered many Vatican power-brokers. That led seamlessly to the see of Arundel and Brighton; here Cormac was clearly very happy, waited on by three nuns in an agreeable house at Storrington, co-chairing the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission and supervising 140 clergy across Surrey and Sussex.

One of those was Father Michael Hill, whom Cormac had sent away for treatment following complaints of child abuse. After failing to complete the course, Hill begged to be allowed to return to his vocation. Cormac appointed him chaplain at Gatwick airport where, he thought charitably, he could do no harm. That, of course, was a bad mistake, and Hill was jailed in 1997 and again in 2002 for further pederastic offences.

This came home to Cormac when the BBC broke the story shortly after his translation to Westminster. He considered resigning, but, to his credit, dealt with the problem head-on. The result was the Nolan Commission and the current rigorous system for safeguarding children in the British Catholic church. The Nolan approach has been imitated by churches around the world, although the Vatican remains institutionally woolly on the subject.

This episode, which is likely to be all that the secular world remembers of his time at Westminster, illustrates Cormac’s strengths: steadiness under fire and a sure touch with the establishment. It did not prevent him receiving his cardinal’s hat in February 2001.

An English Spring is a quiet read, and the chapter on the Murphy-O’Connor family is the best. Nevertheless Cormac gently conveys the essence of his approach. He is a Vatican II man, interested in ecumenism and re-evangelising a society that has largely lost touch with organised religion. Where Basil Hume believed that everything began with the sacraments, “My experience has been that you’ve got to hear the Gospel first, and have some experience of what the Christian life looks and tastes like.” He approves of the Alpha Course.

That outlook brings him firmly into Pope Francis’s camp, though he professes to admire John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Cormac and Cardinal Bergoglio hit it off when they were red-hatted in 2001, and were part of a group of like-minded cardinals he dubbed La Squadra (the Team). Although he betrays no secrets, there is a fascinating account of the 2005 conclave that elected Benedict. At 81 Cormac was too old for the next election, but he dined with Bergoglio the night before it began. After the Argentine emerged as Pope Francis I, he greeted Cormac with the words: “Tuo e culpevole!” (You’re to blame.)

Many English Catholics feel that Cormac, perhaps because he is at ease with the powerful, failed to lead from the front on issues that matter to them: secularisation, marriage, abortion and media hostility. This is not entirely fair: mostly he was not listened to by government or the media, even though he received Tony Blair into the Catholic Church shortly after he left office.

Ironically, it has taken the slaughter of Christians in the Middle East to bring Christianity back into the national discourse. And it has been the tireless work of lay agencies such as Aid to the Church in Need, rather than the faint exhortations of the bishops, that has proved most effective. In a post-Vatican II Church, that may be the way ahead — and one that Cormac himself might approve.

The post Unturbulent Priest appeared first on Standpoint.

Jacobite pincushion, embroidered with the words “God Bless P.C. [Prince Charles] and Down With The Rump”, c.1745

Nevertheless, those at Douai and, even into the 20th century at Ushaw, viewed themselves as having a longer pedigree. In the 16th century, Allen and his group of Oxford-educated Catholic exiles viewed Elizabethan Oxbridge as having slipped into heresy. Hence, they were the true Oxbridge, keeping the flame of scholarship alive until the return of England to the Catholic faith.

Westminster vestment, 1460-90, from the royal wardrobe of Richard III

This mindset helps explain the hugely important library at Ushaw, which contains several globally unique works, not to mention unbound copies of the first issues of The Pickwick Papers and John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua; first editions of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises; and a rare, complete set of the Louis XIV-aggrandising Cabinet du Roi, a 16-volume set of plates which catalogues the king’s royal houses; their interiors, gardens, paintings and sculptures. The list goes on.

The Sloane Chalice, commissioned for Pope Paul V, 1605-1621

Of equal note are the college’s other treasures, not to mention its architecture: Ushaw has the rare privilege of boasting contributions from every one of the Pugin dynasty. The collections are currently curated by staff from Durham University museums and libraries.

St Cuthbert’s Ring, c.1200

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During the election campaign we have had politicians doing God and churchmen doing politics, but have heard very little on the most important factor in all of this: the religious voters. As I write, hustings are taking place in churches, chapels and mosques across the country but you will hear little about it. Few focus groups will involve the faithful; few polls will exclusively target believers. The lack of reference to, or analysis of, the religious vote in the UK reflects the overwhelmingly secular mindset of most politicians, pollsters and their associates in think-tanks and across the media. Ethnicity is the preferred distinguishing mark, with “BMEs” (black and minority ethnic) the latest acronym favoured by the number crunchers and policy wonks in Whitehall. But the lumping together of ethnic minorities, and Christians for that matter, is even more problematic at election time. Can we really say that today’s ethnic minorities have a shared experience, let alone shared values, which collectively determine their partisan affiliation? Do Christians who worship under the same cross tick the same box in the polling booth?

The tendency to slice British society along ethnic lines is in fact a hangover from Britain’s outdated model of multiculturalism forged in the 1970s, which was secular in its construction and hinged on what respected sociologist Tariq Modood has called  a “white/black dualism”, one that ignored the fact that most minorities (particularly Muslims, who are an ethnically diverse group united by faith) classify themselves by their religion rather than their race. A connection between faith and party is much more illuminating than any lazy link between race and party. Among Britain’s non-Christian communities for example, there is a clear correlation between Muslim voters who tend to vote Labour, Jewish voters, once Liberal, then Labour, and now overwhelmingly Tory, and Buddhists, who side with the Liberal Democrats. Hindus and Sikhs are much more evenly split between the two main parties.

Data analysis on the religious vote over the last 40 years collated by the Christian think-tank Theos also reveals that despite growing secularisation there is still a clear political demarcation between Christian denominations and political affiliation. Unlike those on the European continent, the post-war period did not see the emergence of a singular Christian party in the UK but the continuation of historic religious-political bonds that had governed politics since the 19th century. Anglicans are still overwhelmingly Tory voters and twice as likely to vote Conservative as Catholics, who remain predominantly Labour supporters regardless of how devout they are. It perhaps does not need saying that there exists a clear political divide between churchgoers and their church leaders: “Guardian readers preaching to Telegraph readers” was how one Anglican vicar put it in the 1980s, a phrase that still rings true today in most parishes. (Incidentally, the Catholic Church often has the opposite tension.) For all their protestations, church leaders have failed to convert their congregations politically.

Britain’s Nonconformists — a shrunken army since their glory days as the spiritual force behind the 19th-century Liberal party — are now more evenly spread across all parties. Statistics for the 2010 general election, for example, revealed that while the majority of Baptists and Methodists voted Conservative, United Reform Church members favoured the Liberal Democrats, and Free Presbyterians voted Labour.

Those with no religion are less likely to vote Conservative and, significantly, are more likely to be swayed by the less established parties. The irreligious, who constitute an ever-increasing proportion of voters, are not bound by old affiliations or allegiances. Could it be that the recent rise of alternative parties in the British electoral system can partly be explained by the growing secularisation of the electorate? If this is true, the days of the two-party system may well be over.

But we must be careful not to get too carried away with such polls. Faith has always been inherently linked to class in Britain while gender, geography and age are equally important factors in determining voter allegiance. Jews in Salford, for example, are more likely to vote Labour than their London counterparts, partly because of their comparatively lower economic status. Anglican and Catholic women are both more likely to be Conservative than their male counterparts, adding substance to the oft-repeated claim that women tend to be more right-wing then men.

If religious-political affiliations are clearly evident, then what impact, if any, will the religious vote have on the 2015 election? While it will certainly not determine the outcome, its influence will be felt in three important ways. First, the alienation of Christians (chiefly Anglicans) from David Cameron’s Conservative party. Second, the switch of Scottish Catholic Labour voters to the SNP. Third, the changing nature of the British Muslim electorate.

When Parliament passed the gay marriage act, it could be said that the battle for sexuality minorities fought since the 1960s was over. In Britain, however, issues of sexuality or morality had never been partisan matters and for this reason tended not to have a prominent place during elections. In the 1960s, when Parliament decriminalised homosexuality, legalised abortion and liberalised divorce laws, it did so through a series of private members’ bills rather than manifesto pledges while MPs voted with their conscience, free from the discipline of the party whip.

The 1980s saw a new wave of social conservatism as Margaret Thatcher sought to enshrine Judaeo-Christian family values within the fiscal, legal and social fabric of the country. One result of this was Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, which banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools. Section 28 pushed some key Thatcherite buttons — the rights of parents and supposed mismanagement of public funds — while it also conveniently discredited Labour-led local councils in the run-up to the 1987 election. 

In March that year, Labour’s press secretary Patricia Hewitt wrote privately to Frank Dobson MP confirming that the “gays and lesbians issue is costing us dear amongst the pensioners”. At that time gay rights was more problematic for the Left than the Right, exposing the differing priorities of old working-class voters and the new liberal Left. It was for this reason that the Labour leadership initially dithered over whether to support or condemn the clause and it was only after mounting internal pressure that Neil Kinnock came out against it. Importantly, the 1987 election would be the last time that homosexuality would be used as a political pawn by the mainstream parties.

There is little doubt that David Cameron’s promotion of legislation permitting gay marriage in 2014 was part of his attempt to “detoxify” the Tory brand and wipe the slate clean of the murky legacy of Section 28. And there are signs that he is already reaping the rewards. A recent poll by Pink News showed that the Conservatives are now on equal ranking with Labour among LGBT voters; for the Conservatives this represents a five per cent poll rise since 2010. But, just as Kinnock struggled to keep his core working-class voters onside over Section 28, so Cameron has found that in supporting gay marriage he has alienated loyal Anglican Tory voters. These are voters who would not classify themselves as homophobic but do not believe that a homosexual union should be given marriage status and resent even more a feeling that they are unable to voice their objections. In a recent ComRes poll commissioned by Premier Christian Radio, more than a third of respondents claimed that gay marriage had put them off voting Conservative.

This disaffection with the moral direction of the Conservative party is something that UKIP’s Nigel Farage has seized upon in a quest to broaden his party’s appeal beyond Euroscepticism. In UKIP, the old Thatcherite cries of moral and national degeneration are finding their voice once more. Ex-Tory voters are attracted to UKIP because of the party’s promotion of a nostalgic view of England, of which social conservatism and faith are a key element. UKIP’s wooing of Christian voters has in truth been half-hearted, not least because its leadership tends to take a libertarian view of personal morality and, like Margaret Thatcher, considers such issues as a diversion from the main cause. There is, however, a small but dedicated band of what are known as “UKIP Christian Soldiers”, although they are said to number only 1,000, and are no match for the Conservative Christian Fellowship, which works hard to ensure that the party keeps in touch with the grass roots in the pews. On gay marriage, Cameron took a political gamble; time will tell whether his decision to trade a band of hitherto loyal Christian Tory voters for socially liberal and secular floating voters will pay off.

On the surface, the politics of Scotland appear to represent a unique case, although the rise of the SNP too reflects the overall UK downward trend in old denominational identities. The recent surge of the SNP is one that can in part be explained by religion. Sectarianism, which for a long time cast a dark shadow over Scottish society and dominated its politics, has declined rapidly over the last 20 years, creating a void which has been replaced with a secular nationalism. Depending on how you see it, the Scots have either embraced national victimhood or national self-determination as their new religion, which in many respects is as unedifying and hysterical as the sectarianism of yesteryear. For a long time, the Tories and Labour in Scotland lazily fed off the sectarian divide within Scottish society while it has been the SNP which has capitalised on its decline.

This is a remarkable turnaround for the SNP, once dubbed the “Tartan Tories”, who were typified by their romantic, parochial and essentially conservative ideology and whose growth had long been stunted because of their inability to win over Catholic voters. The 1970s may have seen a limited surge in the SNP but not among Catholics. In the words of John Curtice, Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University, “At that point the concern among Catholics was that an independent Scotland might become a replica of Ulster.”

In the 1990s and 2000s, as social and economic barriers for Scottish Catholics disappeared and the SNP morphed into a left-of-centre party seemingly more in tune with traditional Scottish Labour voters than the Labour party itself, so the SNP started to make serious gains among the Catholic working-class electorate. Catholics began to see Scottish nationalism as something which embraced rather than excluded them. The narrative of the SNP championing the underdog citizen and the underdog nation is one to which all Scots, regardless of religious affiliation, can subscribe.

Equally important has been the declining importance of the Church of Scotland in both Scottish religious and political life. As a Calvinist national organisation the Church of Scotland is ecclesiastically unique, but before devolution it too held a specific duty as the seat of Scottish nationalism. The Kirk’s debates were relayed live on BBC Scotland, as moderators and elders were naturally assumed to be articulating the concerns and views of the Scottish nation. Unlike the Church of England, no one questioned whether it should be meddling in politics.

It is partly for this reason that Mrs Thatcher’s speech to the General Assembly in 1988 (in which she proceeded to lecture the Kirk on the true meaning of Christianity) proved so explosive. It was a complete affront to Scottish (religious) national identity. But, paradoxically, while the speech helped further alienate an already anti-Thatcherite Scotland from the Conservatives, it also signalled the last days of the Kirk at the centre of Scottish national life. Within ten years its role would be replaced by the Holyrood parliament while it witnessed a near-collapse in its membership. Part of the reason the SNP are such a confident and pervasive political force is that their support lies not in an ageing, devout population but in a younger, less religious electorate. While its strength can be attributed to secularisation, its rise cannot be understood without reference to the decline of old religious-political bonds.

Politics in Scotland are not complicated by a multi-faith electorate, but south of the border they certainly are. But although Jews, Hindus and Buddhists may form only a tiny fraction of the electorate, but the opposite is true of the British Muslim community, which currently makes up a third of BMEs and 4.8 per cent of the population. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of Muslims in England and Wales rose from 1.55 to 2.77 million. This naturally translates into electoral power: 26 parliamentary constituencies are now 20 per cent Muslim, while YouElect has estimated that Muslim votes have the potential to influence the result in 32 constituencies.

The legacy of the War on Terror, however, has meant that Muslim affiliation to the Labour party is no longer guaranteed. In both 2005 and 2010 a proportion fled to the Liberal Democrats; in 2015, many are undecided voters.

The main issue when speaking of the “Muslim vote” is not who they will vote for, but whether they will vote at all. Muslims in Britain are more disinclined to vote than any other minority group (an apathy which predates the War on Terror). In 2010, just 47 per cent of Muslims voted, compared with 65 per cent of the general population. If the Islamic community feels disenfranchised and victimised, then voting must be encouraged as a way of overcoming this.

More pointedly, the Muslim electorate is changing. It is now inaccurate to depict Muslims as low-skilled, low-paid and marginalised archetypal Labour voters: 43 per cent of Muslims own their own property, 47 per cent are born in the UK and only 6 per cent have English language issues. The number of those Muslims with no qualifications dropped from 39 per cent to 26 per cent between 2001 and 2011. With the emergence of a more sophisticated, heterogeneous Muslim electorate, especially one that is overwhelmingly young in composition, its allegiance to Labour cannot be taken for granted. Like the Hispanic vote in America, the Muslim vote in the UK is numerically significant and will in the long term have an increasing influence on the outcome of elections.

Is there evidence that some are pushing a distinct (and indeed negative) Muslim political agenda? In 2010, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) claimed to have successfully galvanised the Muslim vote to unseat three MPs whom they considered “pro-war Zionists” and hostile to Islam. There was in fact little evidence that the results were genuinely down to MPAC’s actions. In March this year, the Muslim Council of Britain issued a document called Fairness not Favours, spelling out the issues for Muslims at election time. Unlike the pastoral letter from the Church of England’s House of Bishops, the statement received little coverage in the mainstream press. But the tone of the MCB was remarkably similar to the Anglican bishops in advocating policies which furthered the common good, while also highlighting specific Muslim concerns such as rising Islamophobia and Britain’s policy on Palestine, its tone mirrored that of the Anglican pastoral letter in. Statistical evidence regularly points to the fact that Muslim voters are not exceptional in their voting concerns, with education, hospitals, jobs and tax foremost in voters’ minds.

Bracketing Muslims under the umbrella term “ethnic minorities” predetermined to vote Labour is problematic. So too is characterising the Islamic community as a homogenous group who thrive on victimhood and are hostile to the British political system. British Muslims need to find their electoral voice and the British political system needs to wake up and listen.

If politicians make claim to their faith, Christian or other, they do so not out of a wish to appeal to devout voters but because the majority of the British electorate take some comfort in knowing that their leaders have some (but not too much) spiritual guidance.

But unlike many Americans, the British do not vote with their Bible in one hand and their ballot paper in the other. Faith may not determine the election result, yet it is certain that changes in the nation’s religious make-up are having a knock-on effect on the political landscape of Britain. Old allegiances are dying, new allegiances are being forged. The religious vote still matters — but for how much longer?
 

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Catholic critics, including the Editor of this magazine in the Sunday Times, refight the Reformation by accusing her of producing a modern version of the old patriotic Protestant history; a fictionalised verion of Our Island Story. And it is true that Mantel’s Thomas More is a twisted sadomasochist who tortures and executes Protestants, rather than the exemplary Renaissance humanist of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. But then no honest writer or historian can follow Bolt’s airbrushing of More’s heretic-hunting, and Mantel, for all her inventive gifts, is a stickler for historical accuracy.

Her Cromwell is not quite a hero. Mantel keeps him at a distance by writing about him in the third person. But Catholic writers have a half point when they say we see events through his eyes, just as we see the French Revolution in her novel A Place of Greater Safety through the eyes of Danton, Desmoulins and Robespierre rather than the eyes of the revolution’s victims. But you need to be a religious propagandist yourself to believe that her choice of point of view makes Mantel’s work propaganda.

Equally hopeless in my view are the political commentators who have mused on the strangeness of the public’s appreciation of Wolf Hall. We are supposedly sick of manipulative fixers. Yet we warm to her Cromwell. Perhaps secretly we admire the Osbornes and the Mandelsons, despite all our protestations to the contrary.  At least they get things done.

If you want, you can find something in their argument too, and agree that Mantel relishes the brutal realities of politics.

Peter Straughan’s script for the BBC is a masterpiece. He compresses two long novels into a mere six hours of television, without ever cluttering the screen or hurrying the pace. I’ll watch the series again just to try to work out how he did it. Straughan, like Mantel, does indeed show Cromwell as an operator. When the director Peter Kosminsky turns his camera on him at court, Mark Rylance’s Cromwell never lets his feelings show. His face is the mask of the imperturbable bureaucrat, until the moment he is sure his back is covered and he can let rip with the withering voice of a man of power.

But to think that Mantel is just praising or dissecting a practical politician is as simple-minded as thinking she is just updating Protestant patriotism. The screamingly obvious fact about her great historical novels is that she is drawn to revolution. Her glory as a writer is that she shows better than any novelist I know how fast the old certainties can vanish; how events historians will write hundreds of millions of words about happen in a shorter time than it takes a historian to write an academic paper. One minute you must subscribe to the rules of Catholic England or Bourbon France to prosper or just survive, the next they are gone, and there is no going back.

Mantel once said of the working-class matriarchs, who dominated her—Catholic—childhood, “They’d been nowhere but they’d seen everything.” You could say the same of her. Mantel understands hope, ambition, envy and, unusually for a woman writer, male sexual desire, but her writing draws its power not only from her startling imagery or her cool observation of her characters, but from her ability to heighten familiar emotions in the furnace of revolution.

The jealousies and flirtations of Anne Boleyn and her ladies-in-waiting become evidence that will secure her execution when Henry VIII needs Cromwell to find a reason to be rid of her. Revolutionary times allow Cromwell and Robespierre to turn their grudges and insecurities into reasons to murder.

The view of Wolf Hall as simple-minded anti-Catholicism or a mere examination of everyday political chicanery fails to see her in the round because, above all else, Mantel understands the elation and despair of revolution.

In A Place of Greater Safety, the young Camille Desmoulins is caught eavesdropping on a conversation between his father and the Prince of Condé on the possibility of revolution coming to France. The prince isn’t angry. He kindly asks the boy how he stayed still and silent for so long. His friendliness isn’t reciprocated.

“Perhaps you froze my blood,” Camille said. He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. “Of course there will be a revolution,” he said. “You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model.”

Desmoulins does not build a pure republic. His revolution ends in tyranny, and Desmoulins ends on the steps to the guillotine with his comrades urging him to pull himself together and not give the mob the satisfaction of seeing him cry.

In Wolf Hall, Cromwell delights in his master Henry VIII. Anything seems possible as long as he has the king’s ear.
 

You could watch Henry every day for a decade and not see the same thing. He admires Henry more and more. Sometimes he seems hapless, sometimes feckless, sometimes a child, sometimes master of his trade. Sometimes he seems an artist, in the way his eye ranges over his work; sometimes his hand moves and he doesn’t seem to see it move.

As Cromwell gathers more power, he dreams he can turn England into an industrious Protestant nation where the poor are put to work, good folk read the Bible in English and merchants prosper. Yet all his power and hopes depend on the nearest England has had to a Stalin. The violence he needs to fulfil his ambitions will destroy him as surely as it will destroy the French revolutionaries. Henry VIII’s ministers, wives and nobles find, as the Bolsheviks were to find, that the most dangerous place in the world is the seat next to a tyrant.

Damian Lewis’s Henry is charming, charismatic and boyish. He looks as if he barely cares for power, until the moment his eyes narrow and he pulls Cromwell close. He must have what he wants, and if he does not get it someone must pay. Eventually that someone will be Cromwell.

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Cooper understands that women’s power doesn’t always come through formal institutional roles. Rather, it’s the “informal happenings of daily life” — sharing a meal, caring for the vulnerable, offering hospitality — that provide a framework for the transmission of culture. Christianity lacked a formal structure in its earliest years: meetings took place in courtyards or households, communities formed around converted families. Women were often at the centre of things, providing hospitality and shelter for new converts and creating what Cooper calls a “tide of female networking”.

Few documents preserve the “small-scale acts of seemingly unimportant people that allowed Christianity to snowball into an empire-wide spiritual revolution”, so Cooper reconstructs this forgotten world of early Christian women from “glancing references” in surviving early texts. She admits the book “remains an exercise of the imagination” but this is academic modesty. Band of Angels is quietly informed by scholarship, and it’s Cooper’s individual genius — her particular familiarity with sources gained over years of research — that allows her imaginatively to cross-reference texts, adding line and texture to otherwise blurry patches in the historical record.

For all that academic scaffolding, Band of Angels is not a dry work but a pacy tale of heroines, martyrs, virgins, mothers and sisters. The narrative rarely slackens and manages the tricky task of slipping in historical context without being an obvious lesson in ancient history. Starting with Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, Cooper takes several women named in the letters and asks who they were. As a tent-maker, Paul probably encountered prosperous and independent women in the cloth trade who owned property and businesses in their own right: “they were used to juggling the sometimes diverging demands of a complex identity.”

Early Christianity from a woman’s point of view is not a tale of domestic drudgery. These are women of spirit who “discover a blazing fierceness of purpose when faced with the impossible”. Women like Thecla, for example, who turned away from her expected role as wife and mother, leaving fiancé, home and family to follow Paul and preach the gospel. This kind of thinking didn’t go down too well with the imperial authorities and many early Christian women met sticky ends in Roman arenas, thrown to the lions in gladiatorial games.

The turning point came with the conversion of the empress Helena, mother of the first Christian emperor Constantine. Cooper is careful not to overstate Helena’s role “as the mother of imperial Christianity”, focusing more on the effects of legitimation of the Church as a powerful organisation within Roman society. 

This marks a “an institutional ‘hardening’ of the faith” in which women have to renegotiate their place, particularly as worship moved out of households into newly-built basilicas. Cooper presents this as a period when women could influence culture through poetry, reading, and scholarship. 

By the fourth century, books transmitted “ideals of ascetic renunciation and virginal purity” which made chastity seem like an attractive option for women. Communities of virgins and widows flourished, offering a release from volatile husbands and constant childbearing with a high risk of infant and maternal mortality. Women gained like-minded company and the chance to do good works for the poor and vulnerable.

Spiritual power is Cooper’s main focus, “not the offices and institutions that had sprouted like weeds” within the Church, and where women are concerned Cooper’s narrative makes it clear that spiritual power operates more effectively where structures are looser and improvised. There are implications for developing a deeper theology of women in the church, particularly when the ordination of women remains a contentious issue, but Cooper never strays out of her area of expertise into theological territory. 

Band of Angels is not a book for feminist theologians, who would be familiar with most of the material anyway. It’s telling that Cooper’s ideal reader is her own mother, and she describes “a desire to write the kind of book that she and my aunt would have wanted to read”. 

It is pitched at smart, interested, spirited women. I can already think of a few female friends who would enjoy it, and suspect its success will depend on word of mouth and the quiet tide of female networking.

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Presses have turned quickly since then. Editor and Vatican analyst Robert Moynihan has been quicker than most, barely six weeks passing between “Habemus Papam” and the publication of Pray For Me. Billed as the “ultimate introduction” to the life and spiritual views of Pope Francis and written in just two weeks, Pray For Me favours short sentences and punchy paragraphs.

This is Moynihan as the Vatican’s anti-Dan Brown: “Restaurants emptied, and the people of Rome hurried to see who the new pope was. It was dark now, and cool, and there was a slight drizzle . . . He stood silently for a while, gazing out over the crowd of some 200,000. He did not speak.” Heavy on description, light on analysis, Moynihan approaches his subject as a journalist keen to give a soft focus. There are anecdotes about the papal penchant for public transport, and much kissing of babies.

The reader does get some new information: there’s a potted biography and a chapter on Pope Francis’s spiritual guides and influences but Pray For Me is largely given over to events immediately after the papal election, allowing Moynihan to sidestep areas needing greater attention. The controversy surrounding Bergoglio’s time as a Jesuit superior during Argentina’s “dirty war” gets a mention if only to reiterate the unknowns.

Where Pray For Me is written in the first flush of love for Pope Francis, wanting others to feel the love too, On Heaven and Earth deepens what Catholics outside the Spanish speaking world can know about the man himself. Published as Sobre el cielo y la tierra in Argentina in 2010, its translation into English offers an insight into what Catholics can expect from their new leader.

On Heaven and Earth brings together a series of dialogues between Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Abraham Skorka, a rabbi and biophysicist. For years both men promoted inter-religious dialogue in their native Argentina, seeking to build bridges between Catholicism, Judaism and the secular world. They scheduled a meeting to talk and share their thoughts, a fruitful event leading to a series of meetings and recorded conversations about the big issues “seen through the prisms of local society, global concerns and the evidence of villainy and nobility that surround us”. As a transcript of those conversations the resulting book is organised and edited, certainly, but unpolished to some extent; discursive, not a collection of carefully prepared statements.

Twenty-nine short chapters cover a range of topics. God, the Devil, atheists, same-sex marriage, women, abortion, fundamentalism, euthanasia, divorce, science, the Arab-Israeli conflict — all the neuralgic issues are there. On the face of it Skorka and Bergoglio do not shy away, but the dialogue is tentative, conciliatory even. “Dialogue requires that each participant become acquainted with the other person,” writes Rabbi Skorka in a foreword. Each participant in this conversation states their view, that the other might become acquainted with it, but there’s little disagreement or vigorous debate. The tone is measured and thoughtful with Bergoglio remaining slightly in the background. What he says is clear, economically and diplomatically expressed, but mutable. On the issue of priestly celibacy, for example, he says, “For the time being, I am in favor of maintaining celibacy” — that “for the time being” leaving a question mark hanging in the air.

For those looking to see where Bergoglio stands on fundamental questions there won’t be any surprises. This Pope is definitely Catholic. He clearly articulates Catholic teaching and if he’s a little backward in coming forward about where he stands personally it’s due to characteristic self-effacement. Those willing to read between the lines can assume Bergoglio’s orthodoxy. His emphasis on testing doctrine over time indicates a Pope who won’t start making changes to please a secular liberal consensus: “I am respectful of all new spiritual proposals, but they must be authentic and submit themselves to the passage of time.” Still, there are those who will be made uneasy by having to make assumptions about orthodoxy.

On Heaven and Earth reveals a Pope who is conservative but open to change, open to dialogue. Dialogue in this case means a respectful attitude towards difference while maintaining an emphasis on where people meet. In Bergoglio’s words, “It supposes that we can make room in our heart for their point of view, their opinion and their proposals . . . To dialogue, one must know how to lower defences, to open the doors of one’s home and to offer warmth.”

Jorge Mario Bergoglio comes across as a warm and hospitable man, making homely references to Argentine comic books El Tony and Mafalda. Likewise Skorka, but it’s the rabbi who seems more prepared to initiate potentially crunchy dialogue or to say “you have touched on a sensitive topic,” meaning “let’s stay there for a minute.” Discussing the Holocaust, Skorka notes: “I have always said that in the death camps, they did not just kill six million Jews, but they killed Jesus six million times over. That is because many of Jesus’s ideas and his message were Jewish since he carried the message of the Prophets.” Bergoglio acknowledges the shared ground: “This is a very Christian belief: Jesus is in every suffering person.” Skorka, very respectfully, from a distance, then asks: “Monsignor, what do you think about how the Church acted at the time?” Bergoglio gives an on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand-that reply before saying: “Who knows if we could have done something more?” Skorka won’t let it go: “That’s the question, Monsignor. Could it have done more?”

When Bergoglio equivocates, the reader remembers his Jesuit training, but at times in On Heaven and Earth it’s hard to tell what’s mental reservation and what’s characteristic shyness. Both stand him in good stead when it comes to maintaining the necessary reserve in talking across difference with the world’s media ready to pounce. As has already been seen with a papal homily concerning the doctrine of salvation, critics of the Vatican are quick to misinterpret when given the room. If the liberal press is apt to see the straightforward Pray For Me as a PR exercise on behalf of the new Pope, On Heaven and Earth may let us know more about Pope Francis and where he stands, but it will keep critics circling a while yet.

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