(Continued from page 9.)


English courtesy. Some have said he is sim- ply too nice to be an archbishop and that he lacks the necessary grit. So I ask what moves him to anger. He talks about a recent dioce- san pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the hardships inflicted on Christians in Bethlehem by Israel’s security wall and checkpoints. But who was he angry with? “I think ‘angry about’. Angry about the sit- uation. I felt at the same time a feeling of sorrow for the people who are administering that sit- uation. The best thing that we did as a group was to show our solidarity with the Christian communities that we met, to hear their sto- ries and to be alongside them in prayer, as we were at their Sunday Mass.” There are, he says, also injustices at home that move him to anger. He is fearful, for instance, that the neediest may suffer the most in the Government’s programme of public- expenditure cuts. Here, he says, faith communities in Birmingham are speaking with one voice and the Pope’s recent visit has given them added potency. The whirlwind experience of prepar- ing for the papal visit and Newman’s beatification has, he says, been a wonderful introduction to the archdiocese. A major task now, together with other bish- ops, is lay the groundwork for the ordinariate, the vehicle devised by Rome to accommodate groups of Anglicans who decide to cross the Tiber collectively. Archbishop Longley believes there will be some overlap with ordinariate priests ministering to Catholics at large. Many of these priests will be married but, while welcoming them as men with two vocational sacraments, he is adamant that obligatory celibacy will remain the norm for Catholic clergy in the Western Church. Indeed he believes that men considering vocations are becoming more receptive to the tradition of priestly celibacy. “There is an increasing interest in offering for the celibate priesthood in the Church too and that is our Western tradition. It is some- thing that’s important to maintain.” The conversation turns to Christmas and


those Christians who come to church only at this time of the year. How to keep them com- ing, he says, poses a considerable challenge but one that congregations and clergy should be alert to and be mindful to offer a warm wel- come. He believes Britain’s economic woes has led to a reaction against the kind of con- sumerism the Pope has warned against. “Under the present financial pressures people are more open to hearing a word of guidance from Catholics. It is not just clergy by any means, but there is a great deal that Catholics in their own place of work, within their neighbourhoods, can do by sharing their faith.” Pope Benedict has helped with all this and Archbishop Longley quotes something a local Anglican bishop said to him that morn- ing about how people in Britain responded to the Pope as “a father of a fragmented fam- ily”. On his installation Archbishop Longley said he had crossed a threshold. Aided by Benedict XVI’s visit he is crossing many more.


10 | THE TABLET | 11 December 2010


CHRISTOPHER HOWSE’S PRESSWATCH


‘Every postage stamp, every policeman’s helmet, has a cross displayed on it’


Victoria Coren, a funny writer with a self-destructive passion for poker, told the Archbishop of Canterbury recently that she saw him as the Patrick Swayze character in Dirty Dancing and herself as the Jennifer Grey character. For the benefit of those who have not seen the film, she explained, in The Observer, that Swayze is “the grinding, bare-chested target of Jennifer’s summer lust”. No doubt Dr Rowan Williams has


experienced hotter encounters – perhaps stuck in a crowded lift with a posse of African prelates and a delegation from the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement. But, although stranger attractions have been known, Miss Coren eventually made it clear that she was using a metaphor, and that her lust for Dr Williams is in reality an admiration for someone who “is unashamedly, undeniably, publicly and unarguably, both a believer and an intellectual”. Miss Coren is not impressed by


clever, proselytising atheists. “Let them tell you it’s stupid to believe in something you can’t explain,” she recommends. “Then ask them how an iPad works.” She was disappointed, she said, by the recent debate between Christopher Hitchens, for militant atheism, and Tony Blair, for God. This was hardly the way, she thought, to challenge the idea that “the faithful are self-righteous cranks with mad, starey eyes”. “Identify yourselves, thinking


believers!” she appealed. “Don’t be cowed into silence by the idea that faith is the weakness of a halfwit, like buying your goldfish Christmas presents or watching ITV2. It isn’t. I’ll start: I believe in God and I’m perfectly intelligent and rational.” Miss Coren’s pin-up chose a good place to write about “the weary annual attempts by right-thinking people in Britain to ban or discourageNativity plays or public carol-singing out of sensitivity to the supposed tender consciences of other religions”. This is Dr Williams’ piece in the Christmas edition of the Radio Times,which sells millions. “This story of defenceless love”, the archbishop wrote, “touches something universal.”


“I am not ashamed of Jesus Christ. Are you?” Lord Carey had asked a few days earlier in a much more unlikely place – the middle spread of The Sun, a newspaper whose idea of traditional values is to continue to


put what its sub-editors would call a “bare-breasted beauty” on page 3. Lord Carey was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002. He was pictured fully clothed in a warm anorak with snow about him and symbols of God-free Christmas such as Santa Claus dressed as a spaceman. Lord Carey still can’t get over Birmingham City Council’s renaming Christmas as Winterval. And that was in 1998. He finds that an “attempt to ‘airbrush’ the Christian faith out of the picture is especially obvious as Christmas approaches”. Yet “British values are Christian values. Our laws, our democracy and our health, welfare and education provision all find their origin in Christian principles whilst the influence of Christianity on our language, literature and culture has been enormous.” His list of Christian cultural giants is mixed: “Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Newton, William Wilberforce, T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis.” Lord Carey had already attracted coverage for his Not Ashamed Day campaign on 1 December, encouraging Christians to wear crosses. It is not something Christian laity have traditionally done, as I mentioned in a piece in the Telegraph. But every postage stamp, every policeman’s helmet has a cross displayed on it, on the Queen’s crown. If those were removed it would be worrying. A livelier appetite for sectarian


conflict continues to thrive in Scotland, where they have enjoyed a new scandal ending in the tired suffix “-gate”. It is Dallasgate, which concerns Hugh Dallas, who has resigned as the Scottish Football Association’s head of referee development. This followed the posting on his website by a freelance journalist, Phil Mac Giolla Bhain (who lives in the Irish Gaeltacht), of a report that Mr Dallas had sent out by email a joke on the day the Pope arrived in Scotland showing a “children beware” road sign with the added words “Pope coming”. Scotland and its football are so full of Catholic-Protestant antagonism that such a joke could not be overlooked, even if it would only have brought a passing snigger from the proselytising atheists that Miss Coren wants to stand up to.


■Christopher Howse is an assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph.


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