Chairman's Blog

Most of these photos are by John Aron, our brilliant photographer; a couple are by me.

The pilgrimage was brilliant, and the numbers were our highest ever. I'm going to let the photos do the talking.

Gathering on Thursday evening: dinner.

Mass early on Friday morning, celebrated by Fr Michael Rowe

Fr Michael Rowe our Chaplain gives the Blessing of Pilgrims

Visit to Ely Cathedral

Walking out of Ely

Early start on Saturday, to get to Oxburgh for Mass

Oxburgh Hall, a recusant Catholic house

Mass in Oxburgh Chapel

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The knives are out for Jacob Rees-Mogg MP for saying that, as a Catholic, he opposes Same Sex Marriage (SSM) and abortion in all circumstances. I agree and support him, but I feel I must qualify the way he expressed himself, not on a matter of mere technical accuracy but in relation to questions of fundamental importance.

First, he repeatedly notes that he accepts Church teaching, and this is why he opposes these two things. Since many non-Catholics agree with him, today and in the past, this seems a curious way of talking. It seems to be an implicit appeal to religious freedom, and this is indeed how the debate about his comments is now playing out in the media: the question has become 'can Catholics lead political parties, or hold important government positions?' The argument for answering that question in the affirmative is 'religious freedom'. We shouldn't exclude people from positions just because of their religious affiliation. Rees-Mogg and other Catholics should be allowed their eccentric views because those views are part of being Catholic.

This line of argument has a number of unfortunate consequences, not all of which make an appearance in the interview, but all of which will come back to haunt us.

a. It implies that views about SSM and abortion belong on the 'faith' side of a 'faith' vs. 'reason' distinction. In liberal political theory, this means that they are not part of public discourse (which can only appeal to what people in different religions have in common: i.e. reason) and should not be allowed to influence political decision-making. Now, we can argue with this theory and we can dispute the understanding of the relationship between faith and reason it rests upon, but in making brief public statements and in debates the fact that the theory is hugely influential among listeners must be taken into account.

The simple way out here is to emphasise that in the cases of both SSM and abortion Catholics and all others of the same view are appealing not to faith but to reason, a reason which includes the discussion about values which is a necessary part of political discourse. That is, in fact, what the most prominent opponents of SSM and of abortion have consistently laboured to do, in the case of abortion over many decades. Their opponents have equally consistently striven to present them as motivated solely by religious faith (or bigotry, if you prefer), because if that is so they are effectively silenced.

In short, Rees-Mogg's appeal to religious faith plays right into the hands of those who want to make opposition to SSM and to abortion unsayable in public. Once that has happened, they will move on to make it unsayable in private - indeed, they've already started on that. Religious freedom will not protect what has come to be seen as injustice in the public realm: it will not allow us to impose our bigotry about homosexuality on our children any more than it will allow us to practice wife-beating.

b. Suppose, per impossible, that the strategy were successful, and the liberals allowed Catholics the kind of protected private space they sometimes allow Muslims, and say: we must allow those Catholics a bubble of autonomy to be intolerant of homosexual relationships and prevent their daughters getting abortions. Obviously, this is never going to happen, but if it did: it would mean hanging out all our non-Catholic allies out to dry. The extremely courageous secular homosexuals who refuse to conform to type and opposed gay marriage; the non-religious doctors and nurses who can feel in the depths of their being that cutting a tiny human into pieces in the womb is not what they studied medicine to do: what are we saying to them? That they are outside our cosy protected space and can be devoured by the wolves of the new orthodoxy?

c. It is not just a matter of media or political strategy: the idea that our opposition to SSM or abortion derives from faith rather than reason (even when their relationship is correctly understood) is not what the Church teaches. We know that God has asked us to be baptised, from revelation, which we believe by faith. We Catholics are obliged to abstain from meat on Fridays, by command of the Church which has authority over us (and not over non-Catholics). By contrast, we know that marriage cannot be contracted between two people of the same sex, and that killing the unborn is wrong, by reason. It is a matter of Natural Law, not Divine or Ecclesiastical Law.

What the Church tells us is that the obligation of keeping most of the Ten Commandments does not derive from a divine command which could apply to one community and not another, or varied over time. There are many, many obligations in the Old Testament and in the Church which apply to some groups of people and not others, and apply at one time and not at another, and there are others which are universal and unchangeable. We say that the latter are matters of Natural Law. Because the obligations of Natural Law apply to everyone all the time, they must be knowable, at least in principle, to everyone all the time: that is, by reason. When God commanded the Israelites not to kill, on Mount Sinai, He was reminding them of an obligation which already applied to them, and to everyone, and always will.

It should be obvious how vitally important this distinction is in the debates about SSM and abortion. If we allow the impression to form that SSM and abortion is something which Catholics can't do because of rules which apply only to Catholics, then as far as the law of the land is concerned we have lost the argument in a totally irretrievable way. We have also given a totally false impression of the teaching of the Church.

Second, Rees-Mogg keeps saying that marriage is a 'sacrament'. What is the significance of this supposed to be? On this I share the exasperation of the canonist blogger Edward Peters. The sacrament of matrimony takes place when two baptised Christians contract a marriage. The debate about SSM has got nothing, as far as I can see, absolutely nothing, to do with the sacrament of matrimony. It has everything to do with state's recognition of regulation of marriage.

The marriages the state recognises and regulates will be sacramental when they are contracted by two baptised Christians (the Church teaches us); when contracted validly by a couple who are not both baptised Christians they will be what we call 'natural marriages': perfectly licit, binding, life-long, and the proper context for sexual relations and the raising of children.

The only reason I can imagine for Rees-Mogg's baffling but repeated references to sacramentality is that he wants to avail himself of the distinction the government started making in the context of the same sex marriage legislation, between 'civil marriage' and 'religious marriage'. As many people pointed out this was a completely new distinction, with (at that time) no basis in law or linguistic usage. People are either married or they aren't, according to either civil or to canon law. If they are married, they may have been married on a beach in California by a humanist Registrar, or in St Peter's in Rome by the Pope. As a matter of fact, the former may be a sacramental marriage, if the couple were both baptised Christians and neither of them was impeded by Canon Law from getting married in that particular way (as Catholics are, but other Christians are not), and the latter might be a non-sacramental marriage, for example if one of the parties was not baptised.

In short, if Rees-Mogg is trying to appeal to a distinction between marriage-as-religious-ceremony and marriage-without-religious-ceremony, he has chosen the wrong way to do it. Nevertheless, this remains my best explanation for his talking about marriage as a sacrament.

The promise of this spurious distinction between 'civil' and 'religious' marriage was that the question of religious personnel, buildings, and services being used in marriage services could be separated from the question of the legal right to marry, which was being given to same-sex couples. The idea was that such couples could marry, but not have the right to a religious service. This idea collapsed immediately, however, from both directions. On the one side Anglican (and other Protestant) ministers wanted to carry our same-sex marriages in their churches. On the other side, same-sex couples pointed out that they were being denied something not denied to heterosexual couples: clearly wrongful discrimination, if it is conceded that SSM is in fact possible. It was a complete dead-end as a distinction in political terms, as well as being conceptually incoherent.

Third, Rees-Mogg makes a distinction between the two issues, of SSM and abortion, which is seriously unhelpful. He says that in the case of SSM the couple involved are doing something themselves, whereas in the case abortion the rights of the unborn child are at issue. This may seem plausible enough at first glance, until it is remembered that the whole debate about SSM was about the status of marriage as a legally recognised, public institution.

The implication that we can let homosexual couples who wish to 'marry' get on with it, whereas we can't let abortionists and their clients get on with abortion, suggests that marriage is not a public institution with implications for other married couples, children, and society as a whole. Not only was this suggestion not accepted by the Catholic opposition to SSM, it was not accepted by the proponents of SSM either. Same-sex couples were already legally free to shack up with each other, and engage in sexual activity, and they were, by the time of the SSM debate, free to enter into 'Civil Partnerships' which gave them certain legal privileges.

What was being held back from them was the recognition of their relationships as legally equivalent to marriage. That recognition meant that the law ceased to give proper recognition to the natural institution of marriage, which has a different nature and purpose from other kinds of relationship. It ceased to be possible for the law, and therefore employers, the armed services, the taxman, adoption agencies, and a lot of other institutions and individuals, to recognise the difference between a married couple, and a couple in a same-sex relationship who'd been through a certain legal form. Any rights ,privileges, and special treatment accorded to the married couples would from then on have to be accorded to the latter as well, which means in practice that such privileges are watered down, distorted, or abolished.

What is surprising about Rees-Moggs position here, as with his suggestion that opposition to abortion is a matter of faith rather than reason, is how his position undermines that of the many perceptive and courageous defenders of life and marriage, many but not all of them Catholics, who battled and continue to battle for common sense in public debates all over the world. If I were them, I must say I'd be pretty miffed.

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Liturgical prayer: a High Mass of Requiem

In the first post of this pair I explained that Yoga, as typically experienced today in the West (and, for that matter, elsewhere in the world) is not helpfully described as an ancient practice, as a specifically Hindu practice, or as a practice with a basis in a single Indian philosophical tradition. It is is, unfortunately for our purposes in trying to dissent and assess it, too new and too complex for such generalisations.

What can one say, then, about Yoga and the Faith? Are Catholics wrong to feel uncomfortable, as they sometimes do, with Yoga being presented as something for people of 'all faiths and none', to take place in the parish hall like a cake-making demonstration?

I think the easiest way for Westerners to think about Yoga is as related to the New Age. Yoga is such a huge movement that it has a distinct identity from the New Age; also the physical exercise side of Yoga claims to be scientific and medical, and (at least to a degree) is genuinly so. But on the other hand, Yoga derives from many of the same attitudes and aspirations as the New Age, and fits it very comfortably with it. The New Age is full of attempts to use techniques to transcend and to heal; Yoga is one such technique.

What I have said elsewhere about the New Age is applicable in some part to Yoga: that it is the spirituality of the modern world. When modern, secular people want to be spiritually serious, instead of reverting to some dimly remembered Christian confessional practice, as they would perhaps have done fifty years ago, they may start babbling about all religious traditions leading to self-realisation. Reading books, meditating, and meeting up with like-minded people to advance the goal of global self-realisation is something serious New Age people do, but for a much larger group of people, that is what they feel they might do if they felt in a more spiritually serious mood. It is what 'spirituality' means to them.

In the case of Yoga, the goal of self-improvement is focussed on the body, but the door to a parallel self-improvement of the mind and spirit through meditation and changes of attitude is, generally, left very clearly open. And who is to say, in any case, that the improvment of the body is not itself a quasi-religious goal for materialistic people?

It is possible to find doctrinal incompatibility between Yoga and Catholic teaching, when you look at the philosophical views of the higher-level gurus. This invites the response, however, that only a tiny number of the people sitting on Yoga mats have heard of that stuff, and few would understand a word of it if they did. And come to that, the exercises themselves aren't intrinsically connected with the philosophy. On the contrary, people tell us, Yoga practicioners typically think (and are told by their teachers to think) that everything they do in the studio is compatible with any possible religious faith.

The place I would locate the problem, instead, is here: that what we are dealing with is a body of practice which takes place in a culture dominated by New Age attitudes which are incompatible with the Faith, such as the attitude that all religions are basically one, or true, and that spiritual progress can be made through the self-realisation of the body. If you enter the world of Yoga, you enter this atmosphere. There's nothing wrong with bending and stretching. Holding to some myth about how these bends and stretches are related to ancient Hindu polytheism is not, exactly, edifying. Saying 'Om' when you have no idea what it means is clearly spiritually reckless. But even if you avoid those things, I would never recomend a group of Catholics to go to Yoga, because even if they start with the least spiritually-focused Yoga class, there is a good chance that the Yoga world is going to draw them in, and the attitudes of the Yoga world are not theologically sound attitudes.

If that sounds weak, think of some parallels. Suppose there is some perfectly harmless card game which is typically played in the context of gambling for high stakes. Do we need to exercise caution about encouraging Catholics to enter the milieu of such a game? Suppose there was a group which went on bracing country walks, and this particular group tended to attract racists. Would we need to exercise caution in recommending it? The fact that bending and stretching are not spiritually dangerous in themselves does not absolve us from responsibility to ask about who we are going to be bending and stretching with, what kind of attitudes and views are in the atmosphere while this is going on, and what happens to that minority who want to take it a bit further.

However, there is more. The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal Ratzinger, produced a very balanced and sane document in 1989 about non-Christian methods of meditation. Not all Yoga is meditation, but a short period of meditation is included as the conclusion of many Yoga classes, and one attitude one may take to the postures (taught, for example, by one Yoga franchise) is that they are prayers.

Now, the kind of meditation encouraged and facilitated in this context can be problematic. Not all attempts to reach out to the divine within or to the spiritual realm outside of ourselves are well considered. It is easy to say to a person with basically Christian understanding of prayer that they should pray more, and we say that prayer is an obligation on all rational creatures, but if the prayer is being directed in the wrong way, and is informed by the wrong attitudes, then it can be spiritually dangerous.

Actually, all prayer has the potential for danger. Times of intense prayer can be opportunities for temptation, to spiritual pride for example. Prayer is a battle, and we forget that at our peril. The formal and especially the liturgical prayer of Catholics is protected in countless ways from many perils, but it remains a battle. Intense contemplative prayer outside those contexts is highly recommended, but the practioner would do well to do this in the context of competant spiritual direction. It is worth noting that Eastern traditions of meditation can be even more emphatic about the need for the guidance of a mature spiritual teacher, for those undertaking this path. And indeed you can take this point even if you don't think there is anything at all 'out there', because there is still plenty of stuff, not all of it bright and cheery, 'in there'.

Saying 'Om' and clearing the mind of all distractions, in the context of Yoga, simply in order to get in touch with who-knows-what, is not something any sensible person should recommend. One of the key characteristics of the New Age to be relentlessly optimistic about the spiritual life. This optimism is not shared by the authentic Eastern traditions from which it claims inspiration, and is not well founded. As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.

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