NORMALLY, I start this column with something serious, and put
the joke at the end to reward anyone who has struggled through that
far. But an exception has to be made for the Christian Legal
Centre, who last week put out a press release stating that a named
Christian school in Reading was threatened by the anti-extremism
measures brought in after the Trojan-horse scandal in Birmingham:
"The governors of Trinity Christian School in Reading, Berks, have
issued a direct challenge to Nicky Morgan over the way rules
introduced in the wake of the Trojan Horse scandal are being
applied by inspectors," as The Daily Telegraph's
version of the press release had it.
"Staff at the school, which caters for pupils up to the age of
eight, were warned they are failing to meet the new standards which
require schools to actively promote 'British values' of democracy
and tolerance.
"It comes less than a year after the school was rated 'good' by
Ofsted inspectors and graded 'excellent' for its provision for
children's 'spiritual, moral, social and cultural development'.
But, following a further inspection earlier this month, carried out
because of plans to expand, it was warned that it was being
downgraded."
The mention of "plans to expand" prompted one curious bishop to
look up the OFSTED report, from which he learned that, at the time
of the glowing report, the school had had two pupils, and, at the
most recent inspection, three.
Some small, detached, professional part of me rather admires the
Christian Legal Centre for its utter shamelessness.
POSSIBLY there is nothing so absurd that it cannot be used as an
excuse for atrocity. The most sobering thing I read all week was an
interview in the Financial Times with Oleg and Sergey,
brothers from Siberia, and Russian volunteers who are fighting with
a militia involved in President Putin's invasion of the
Ukraine.
Oleg, aged 41, had been "an economist for a well-known
multinational" before signing up: "People say we're in a foreign
country but we're not. This is our land," he said. "This isn't just
material, it's spiritual. It's a fight against the values of the
Western World.
"He rattled off a list of American and European wrongdoings,
mostly centred around the West's growing acceptance of same-sex
marriage and advocacy for gay rights. 'We believe in love - love
between a man and a woman,' he said."
It will no doubt be reassuring to the women raped by Russian
soldiers in this war - as women are raped in all wars - to know
that they are thereby being protected from the threat of same-sex
marriage.
FOR years now, I have been tagging some Anglican news reports
with "schism", but, last week, for the first time started doing so
to stories about the Roman Catholic Church as well. It is a very
remarkable thing that conservative RCs have been so outraged by the
synod on the family that they are starting to wonder out loud
whether Pope Francis is not an antipope.
Two small signs: Cardinal George Pell released the text of a
homily he would have given at a traditional Latin mass in Rome
which contained some meditations on papal authority: "Doctrine does
develop, we understand truth more deeply, but there are no
doctrinal back-flips in Catholic history. . . Pope Francis is the
266th pope and history has seen 37 false or antipopes," he
wrote.
The clear implication is that Pope Francis might be reclassified
as the 38th antipope if he keeps up his campaign to humanise the
discipline on marriage. This was spelled out completely by the
American conservative commentator Ross Douthat, in the New York
Times, on Sunday. It contained a popular historical absurdity:
"And on communion for the remarried, the stakes are not debatable
at all. The [Roman] Catholic Church was willing to lose the kingdom
of England, and by extension the entire English-speaking world,
over the principle that when a first marriage is valid a second is
adulterous, a position rooted in the specific words of Jesus of
Nazareth."
I don't suppose for a moment that any pope at the time thought
that there was a serious prospect of "losing the kingdom of
England" - if Professor Eamon Duffy is right, the popes of the time
had every reason to suppose that King Henry's rebellion would
subside, as all previous ones against their authority had done.
But historical absurdity has never stopped people from believing
what they want to. Douthat's serious point is that "[conservative
Catholics] can certainly persist in the belief that God protects
the Church from self-contradiction. But they might want to consider
the possibility that they have a role to play, and that this pope
may be preserved from error only if the Church itself resists
him."
There probably won't be a schism: conservatives can go into
internal exile just as liberals have been forced to do. But there
will be fireworks.