One of these days, probably very soon, I’ll stop bothering to point
out that the standard of leadership of the Catholic Church in England
and Wales is unacceptably low.
I’d hoped that, following the papal
visit, there would be better news to report.
Instead, there’s really no
news at all – other than the setting up of the Ordinariate, which is a
personal project of the Pope that the bishops were ordered to implement.
It’s true that Archbishop Vincent Nichols doesn’t allow the Bishops’
Conference to undermine papal initiatives, as his predecessor did; also,
one or two unreconstructed Magic Circle monsignori have been passed
over for promotion, though I’ve no idea what part the Archbishop played
in those decisions.
He seems to have imposed his authority on the
Conference, but to what effect?
I can’t see Eccleston Square being
reformed this side of the Second Coming.
(And, talking of the Second
Coming, do you think it would merit a press release from the “Catholic
Communications Network”?)
Here are two specific reasons not to be cheerful. I apologise for
being rude about their Lordships, but they spend so much time singing
their own praises that somebody has to redress the balance.
1. Last week, Archbishop Vincent Nichols used the occasion of a
high-profile lecture at the LSE to deliver some monumentally dull
reflections on selfish bankers and religion in public life.
The prose is as dense and grey as suet. +Vin says nothing about faith
and society that we haven’t heard from dozens of well-meaning churchmen,
but presents his comments as a novel contribution to a debate.
I mean,
seriously:
All these issues in their different ways raise questions about values, and the moral and spiritual resources on which we might draw to help us answer the question about what is the ‘good life’. I believe that religious faith, and in particular the tradition of Catholic social teaching, has something immensely rich to contribute at various levels, the personal of course, but also in relation to the role of the state, of the market and wider civil society. Later on in the lecture I want to offer some thoughts drawn from the fruit of that tradition.
There must be a piece of software that could assemble “common good”,
“richness”, “Catholic social teaching”, “the limitations of markets” etc
into a semi-coherent order to save bishops the trouble of employing
speechwriters.
Also, Archbishop Nichols has the sadistic episcopal habit
of (a) telling you what he’s about to say, (b) saying it and (c)
reminding you of what he’s just said.
These speeches are really just a more ambitious expression of the repetitive waffle known as bishopese, in which Archbishop Nichols is awesomely fluent.
It sounds like this:
It’s wonderful thing to be gathered here as a community to celebrate this occasion, together – for it is indeed an occasion to celebrate. And so we take this opportunity to gather, enjoying this wonderful occasion, in a spirit of celebration, and, as we do so, remembering that we celebrate together, not just as individuals but in community, in communion with each other, you might say…
What a missed opportunity that LSE lecture was.
I suppose it was too
much to hope that +Vincent would say something about the morality of
universities accepting money from murderous dictators – but he didn’t
even lay a glove on his chosen target, the bankers.
“What we saw in the
financial crisis was bad business practice compounded by a culture
celebrating profit as an end in itself,” he revealed.
(Again. We’ve
heard all this before.)
What we also saw, of course, was wicked
overspending by the last government that will ruin the lives of many
Catholics – but the only reference to the architect of that misery I
could find in +Vin’s speech was this:
Jurgen Habermas … speaks about the “motivational weakness” of secular liberal societies. Indeed he was quoted by Gordon Brown in his recent Lambeth Palace speech, and I use the same quotation myself …
I despair. And, while we’re on the subject of episcopal mediocrity:
2. Last month the Catholic Bishops of Wales issued the following guidance to voters in the Welsh referendum:
We, as the current leaders of the Welsh Catholic Dioceses, are not now recommending how to vote in the referendum. However, we broadly support the principle of improving the functioning of the assembly and point out that this would be in line with the principle of subsidiarity found in Catholic social teaching.
We would welcome measures to improve the assembly’s decision-making process. We would also welcome a strengthening of the democratic legitimacy of the national assembly and any measures to increase the accountability of the politicians elected to the assembly.
In other words, we’re not telling you to vote yes, but here are the
reasons why we think you should vote yes.
Both the statement and the
wriggling of the bishops after they were accused of meddling show the
Catholic Church in Wales in a poor light.
But this business of
interfering in politics – almost always in a Leftward direction – and
then denying that you’ve done so just shows how entrenched the Welsh bishops are in the culture of Eccleston Square: not much devolution there.
Eccleston Square, in turn, still draws posthumously on the culture of
New Labour – not just in its political worldview, but also in a
deep-seated evasiveness.
The question is: in the absence of an
electorate, who will turf out the old guard?
I used to think Archbishop
Nichols was up to the task, but no longer.
The man who delivered that
supremely unadventurous LSE lecture isn’t about to rock any boats.