EEK! A religious story on the front page of The Guardian. It’s all right, really: there’s an ecological angle, so that counts as good religion, and excuses the presence of nuns.
Riazat Butt found a Benedictine convent where 22 nuns and two novices were rattling around in an enormous Victorian abbey. They have now arranged to move to a purpose-built and ecologically sound place in Yorkshire. This new Jerusalem does not yet exist, but the paper was able to print some architectural drawings. There was also a nice quotation from one of the nuns at the end of this passage:
“The fate of the old monastery is unclear. In 2002 the nuns decided to sell the Grade II-listed property for £5m but to their disappointment it is still on the market. They wished to direct the proceeds of a sale towards their new home and want to save it from being converted into flats, hotels or spas. One nun suggested it would make a nice open prison.”
BUT, YOU SAY, you would rather have a story about something that has actually happened? Well, there is one about a shooting, but it takes place somewhere you wouldn’t recognise: “Outside The Omen church” according to the subs on the Daily Mirror, The Sun, and the Daily Mail. “A man was gunned down by armed police yesterday in the grounds of the church where horror movie The Omen was filmed,” wrote the Mirror. Only some paragraphs later did it emerge that this was Guildford Cathedral.
OTHERWISE, Ruth Gledhill got aerated about a carol service at St James’s, Piccadilly, where the words of carols were rewritten to have an anti-Israeli stance (News, 14 November). There is something to offend everyone in a gathering of Jews singing anti-Zionist Christmas carols outside a church, but there has been so much outrage one way or another over the years that the best she could come up with was the news that “the offices” of Dr Williams and Lord Carey had both condemned the carol service.
MORE BARRELS being scraped vigorously over at The Sunday Telegraph, where Jonathan Wynne-Jones deserves quite a bit of credit for turning “Abbot condemns materialism” into a news story. “Disney accused by Catholic cleric of corrupting children’s minds” says the headline. I have to say, I think of it as a tribute to the superior quality of English religion over American that, when Disney is denounced here, it is not for its recognition of gay partnerships, but for selling unpleasant and mendacious tat.
I also like the way in which being on television makes you automatically one of Britain’s leading clerics: “Fr Jamison, who is one of Britain’s most prominent Catholic clerics, claims that brands such as Disney market themselves to be about more than mere materialism to create an addiction to consumption.
“This is basically the commercial exploitation of spirituality,” he says, adding that as a result Disney and other corporations “inhabit our imagination. Once planted there they can make us endlessly greedy. And that is exactly what they are doing.”
THESE ARE thin pickings for what might be an interesting time of year; but what is going on outside the narrow world of religious journalism is astonishing.
The collapse of The Independent into the arms of the Daily Mail is something that none of us could have foreseen; but on Friday it was announced that the whole paper would be moving from Docklands into the Mail building in Kensington — except it won’t be the whole paper, since half the point of the move is to sack almost all the support staff. There will, of course, be journalistic redundancies, too. No one knows where in the Mail’s business the journalists will be squeezed: they will probably have to hot-desk, but must hope there is more than one desk to share. They will be allowed to queue for soup in the Mail’s canteen, though.
A couple of days after the news broke, I bumped into Jonathan Fenby, The Independent’s first Home Editor, who later twice turned down the editorship when the paper first collapsed into the arms of the Mirror group in the 1990s, on the very sensible grounds that he did not want to have anything to do with David Montgomery.
We discussed, as all old Independent hands must, whether it could ever be returned to quality. We decided, as all old Independent hands do, that it was too late, and would be too expensive. The paper is selling scarcely 120,000 copies a day at full price, and losing at least £12 million a year.
But if anyone does have the money and ambition, it is the Mail group. I don’t think The Independent would survive as a left-wing Mail if it were entirely taken over. But it might go right-wing and up-market, to pursue once more the aim we had as an unofficial slogan in 1986: to be what The Times would be if it were still a proper paper. If stranger things have happened, I can’t think of any.