NOTEBOOK Cap doesn’t fit


WHEN Archbishop Vincent Nichols gave his lecture “Good Life in Hard Times” at the London School of Economics last week, his focus was the place of faith in a society expe- riencing economic difficulty.


But “hard times” could also describe the


current experience of the LSE itself, as it is assailed on all sides over its involvement with Saif Gaddafi, son of the Libyan dictator, who gave the LSE £1.5 million for research a year or so after it awarded him a PhD for a thesis that was allegedly plagiarised. The Gaddafi fiasco meant that Archbishop Nichols lost out; it has been a tradition to offer illustrious speakers an LSE cap, but host Professor Conor Gearty told the arch- bishop that, after the last cap was given to Saif Gaddafi, they had decided not to give out another one.


(See Conor Gearty, page 8.) In the swim


FIRST IT was Ann Widdecombe, but now another Catholic politician can be added to the list of people who have turned down the chance to become the British Ambassador to the Holy See. Edward Leigh, MP for Gainsborough, has confirmed that he was offered the job twice, before and after the general election, but turned it down. “I am happy in the House of Commons, happy to be here,” said the former chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, who was educated at the Oratory School, Reading, adding: “We want someone with enthusiasm to do that job. They could do a better job than me.” Perhaps leaving his daily routine was too much of a wrench for the MP. Every day he swims in the Serpentine in London’s Hyde Park, then walks his dog, Toby, around the park before attending Mass at the Brompton Oratory, South Kensington, London. Currently the post in Rome is being filled


temporarily by a chargé d’affaires, George Edgar, who was involved with the Foreign Office’s preparation for the papal visit.


One for the road OVER LENT, one Anglican bishop is going the extra mile to offer prayers for anyone who wishes them. Bishop Bob Evans of Crediton, in Devon, has asked people either to text their prayer requests to him or contact him via a special prayer page on Facebook. Bishop Bob, who received hundreds of requests with a similar initiative last year, explained nothing will stop him from praying for those who ask, saying: “As my role takes me all over Devon, I will stop what I am doing each day – pulling over in lay-bys if necessary – to pray for people.”


20 | THE TABLET | 12 March 2011


trend. A Just Church has become the bestseller in the city’s Waterstone’s only weeks after being published – a first for a religious book in the store. The author, the Anglican vicar Chris


Howson, urges Christians to help the poor, oppose far-right groups such as the English Defence League and deal with international issues such as the Israel-Palestine conflict. Married to a Uruguayan, the clergyman has visited liberation theology projects in Brazil and wrote the book while on a three-month sabbatical in Tacuarembó, Uruguay. He sees liberation theology – putting faith


In a similar vein, on Ash Wednesday, the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of Hull and Whitby took to their respective city centres to ask people if they wanted prayers said for them.


Head hunted JOHN McINTOSHmay have retired as the long-serving headmaster of the London Oratory School five years ago, but now he has found a new role as an adviser to Britain’s first free school. Mr McIntosh is a member of the steering group in charge of establishing the West London Free School in Hammersmith that is being founded by the journalist Toby Young. The retired head has even found the new school its premises, Palingswick House, a handsome former school building it is hoping to buy from Hammersmith and Fulham Council. Mr McIntosh was working as a consultant for the local council when he met Young at a meeting. He said the free school’s ethos will be similar to that of the Oratory – one of England’s top-performing Catholic state schools – which has already played a role in helping to organise its music programme. “There are common interests with the


Oratory, and we want to cement that rela- tionship,” said Mr McIntosh. “The free school will aim to offer the same sort of classical, liberal education – obviously without the religious element.” He said that admissions for the free school’s


first intake in September were heavily over- subscribed.


Liberating Bradford CRITICS OF liberation theology argue the movement is a little passé and lacking the energy of years past. But a new book by a cleric in Bradford and published by Continuum appears to have bucked this


into action to help the oppressed – as crucial to his aims, telling us: “The sales of the book shows liberation theology is alive and kicking and, in a time of cutbacks in public expenditure, it’s time for its re-emergence.” The priest, who works in a city-centre parish, has boycotted Total garages (in solidarity with the people of Burma) and recently occupied a branch of Barclays Bank in Bradford and attempted to turn it into a community library.


Remembering McCabe HE WAS irascible, difficult, obnoxious, witty. He drank too much. He was hard to live with. He liked nothing better than sparring with others over whiskey, and breaking into rebel Irish songs. He was also much loved. Ten years after the theologian Herbert


McCabe died, his Dominican brethren, former academic colleagues and friends gathered at Blackfriars, Oxford, to remember him and to explore his work. The focus of Saturday’s symposium, supported by The Tablet Trust, was to consider McCabe’s thinking on faith, particularly in the light of his study of Aquinas. The day’s organiser, Vivian Boland OP, put it in a wider context: “His whole work was to try and help people find meaning in an era when many were at a loss.” The day’s attention focused first on language


and flowed through sign and symbol to sacrament. Fergus Kerr OP identified that it was key to McCabe’s analysis of Aquinas that the understanding of God depended on him being a Hebrew and biblical idea rather than a Greek metaphysical idea, while Paul O’Grady, lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, explored the influence of Wittgenstein on McCabe. Sarah Coakley, Norrish-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, recalled the extent to which McCabe both influenced and was influenced by Protestant trends of the 1970s and 1980s. When she was a Cambridge undergraduate, Dr Coakley said, there was no study of Aquinas as part of the Tripos, and it was Herbert McCabe who had made Thomist thought important to Anglicans.


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