A FEW quick notes on the rumblings after the Roman Catholic
Church's Extraordinary Synod on the Family: it was deliciously
nostalgic to see Cardinal Burke complaining that the Church was now
"a rudderless ship", as he did in an interview with a Spanish
religious weekly.
It reminded me of Lord Habgood's observation that the people who
complain about "lack of leadership" almost always mean that there
is leadership which is going in the direction they think wrong. I
suppose this is a variation of the ethical view that holds that it
is always different if we do it: it isn't leadership unless we do
it.
Ross Douthat, in The New York Times, continues his
attack on change in a more thoughtful way: "The question of divorce
and remarriage is among the issues where the Catholic claim to a
special authority, both contra Protestantism and in its own right,
has historically been strongest, because it's place where the
binding force of tradition and ecclesiastical stewardship of the
same have helped Catholicism hold a line that's very clearly rooted
in scriptural, indeed gospel authority."
THE only two specifically Anglican stories this week were
unimproving: the resignation of the former Archbishop of York Lord
Hope from various appointments in the wake of the Cahill report on
the abuse of children by Robert Waddington, the former Dean of
Manchester. This was the only honourable course, I think, after the
judge found that "Our conclusion, having heard his [Lord Hope's]
evidence, is that his concern for the welfare of Robert Waddington
seems to have been paramount in his response to these
allegations."
Yet it deserves to be remembered to his credit that when there
was only one honourable choice, he took it.
The other story, picked up by The Sunday Telegraph some
time after it appeared on these hallowed pages (News, 17
October), appeared to be a case of life imitating St
Gargoyle's: a lay canon of Manchester Cathedral had lost his appeal
against the police who had confiscated the rifles and shotgun from
his home after an argument about the placement of an electrical
socket escalated.
The other party in this disagreement was the vicar. The disarmed
canon, Adrian Golland, took a robust view of clerical authority.
"Despite the ill feeling, Mr Golland ignored a request by the
archdeacon to stay away from St Paul's. 'I was not prepared to be
excluded from a church I had attended some 15 years longer than Rev
McKee,' he said."
In the spirit of those Americans who point out after every
school shooting that if only teachers were heavily armed, these
things would happen differently, I'm tempted to observe that if
only all elderly members of the congregation were armed, there
would be a great many more pews still in English churches.
THE ECONOMIST had a long and thought-provoking piece on
religion in China. It is one of the most under-reported stories of
the past 20 years that millions of adults have converted to
Christianity (and, to a lesser extent, Islam) in the former atheist
countries of China and the Russian Empire.
"There were perhaps 3m Catholics and 1m Protestants when the
party came to power in 1949. Officials now say there are between
23m and 40m, all told. In 2010 the Pew Research Centre, an American
polling organisation, estimated there were 58m Protestants and 9m
Catholics.
"Many experts, foreign and Chinese, now accept that there are
probably more Christians than there are members of the 87m-strong
Communist Party. Most are evangelical Protestants.
"On current trends there will be 250m Christians by around 2030,
making China's Christian population the largest in the world. Yang
Fenggang of Purdue University, in Indiana, says this speed of
growth is similar to that seen in fourth-century Rome just before
the conversion of Constantine, which paved the way for Christianity
to become the religion of his empire."
This led me to a delicious fantasy in which some Chinese
dictator became the new Constantine, and in a thousand years' time
there would be melancholy Anabaptists claiming that everything had
gone wrong for Christianity when it became the state religion of
China.
The most fascinating nugget was the way in which conversions to
Christianity in China have moved up the social scale as they have
become more urban: in the 1980s, it was the hope of miraculous
cures in the absence of any functioning health system in the
countryside which spread it. Now it is spreading among educated
urban types who see in it good for society.
The hardest to forget was the claim that "In 2000 Jiang Zemin,
then party chief, and himself a painter of calligraphy for his
local Buddhist temples, said in an official speech that religion
would probably still be around when concepts of class and state had
vanished."