NOTEBOOK


An honoured guest ONE IS the lead singer of a punk rock band turned campaigner against poverty in Africa and the other is the Primate of All England and leader of the Anglican Communion. Yet despite the obvious differences, the founder of Live Aid, Sir Bob Geldof, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, have become firm friends. So much so that Sir Bob’s spokesman told us that Dr Williams will be among the guests at the Boomtown Rats’ frontman’s sixtieth birthday party today. Also being celebrated is the twenty-first birthday of Sir Bob’s youngest daughter, Pixie, a model. The party is taking place at Sir Bob’s home,


Davington Priory, Faversham, Kent, whose significance as a building will not be lost on a man of Dr Williams’ learning. The twelfth- century priory is a former Benedictine convent that escaped demolition during the dissolution of the monasteries because the last nun in the community died in 1535, before Henry VIII got to work.


While Dr Williams and Sir Bob both share a concern for combating poverty in Africa, they also have children of similar age. Pip Williams and Tiger Hutchence – Geldof (the daughter of the late Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence) are believed to be at the same school.


Intern U-turn ON TUESDAY we were sent a picture of the English and Welsh bishops’ conference’s new parliamentary interns smiling alongside the politicians they had been assigned to work for, including the MP, Jon Cruddas. But the next day we were told that Mr Cruddas would not be getting an intern after all. Although the Labour MP is a Catholic


with a passion for social justice – his hero is Oscar Romero – the bishops’ conference learned rather late in the day that his views on abortion were “at variance” with church teaching. A bishops’ conference spokeswoman told us the intern would therefore be placed with another MP. Since the placement is due to begin on Monday they will have to move fast.


When he stood for the deputy leadership


of the Labour Party in April 2007, Mr Cruddas said that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” but that he was perfectly happy with the current time limit for abortions of 24 weeks. Although it has been judged that Mr Cruddas is not suitable to host a Catholic intern, he was considered fit only last April to address a major gathering organ- ised by the bishops’ conference on the Church and the Big Society. The MP shared a platform with the Archbishop of Westminster under the banner “Building a new Culture of Social Responsibility”.


All change at Heythrop THIRTY YEARSago she started as a theology undergraduate at Heythrop College, at its old Cavendish Square home just north of London’s Oxford Street. Now, Professor Gwen Griffith-Dickson is returning to the Jesuit- run college as its vice-principal. She succeeds Dr Peter Vardy, who is leaving Heythrop after 29 years, and will take up her position in January at the same time as the newly appointed principal, Michael Holman SJ. Professor Griffith-Dickson, a cradle Catholic born in Hawaii, is founder and director of the Lokahi Foundation, an interfaith initiative that helps to build relationships between religions in Britain; “Lokahi” is a Hawaiian word meaning “harmony through diversity”. The foundation set up the Campusalam project, which aimed to de-radicalise Muslim students on university campuses, receiving almost £500,000 worth of government fund- ing to do so. The project was criticised by some, including


Paul Goodman MP, a Catholic, who claimed it was close to the Muslim Brotherhood. Professor Griffith-Dickson, who is a governor of Heythrop, told us this idea was laughable. “We had some jokes around the dinner


table about the Catholic mother of two bringing extremist Muslims together,” she told us, adding that Campusalam no longer receives government funding and works with other faith groups apart from Islam. Previously Director of Doctoral Research at Birkbeck College, University of London, she told us that the Lokahi Foundation is to relocate to Heythrop although it will remain organisationally independent. She is, however, hoping the foundation will work with the college on research projects.


Judge of darkness IF CHRISTIANS in Britain think the BBC is unfriendly towards them, they should con- sider the situation in Poland. The Polish


Church’s Council on Culture has instructed Catholics to stop paying their licence fee after the state-owned Telewizja Polska, better known just as TVP, invited a “Satanist” rock star to appear as a judge on a music talent show. The call for mass civil disobedience was made by Bishop Wieslaw Mering, who told TVP’s board of management director Juliusz Braun in a letter: “We’re doing this because we are powerless and have no alternative – the powerful don’t usually take Christians into account.” The “Satanist” is Adam Darski, who goes


by the stage name Nergal, and is the leader of a band called Behemoth. In August he was cleared of defaming the Catholic Church by tearing up a Bible at a concert. Despite its Catholicity, Poland has one of Europe’s most active “death metal” rock scenes. Some British Christians this week said


they were irritated by claims that the BBC has stopped using BC and AD (Before Christ and Anno Domini) in favour of BCE and CE (Before Common Era/Common Era) as a “religiously neutral alternative”. However, the BBC has denied this, saying that it had no policy guidelines on the issue, and it was up to individual programme-makers what dating system they used.


Unity of purpose WHEN THEY first met in Paris in the 1960s Fr Roger Greenacre was well established as an Anglican ecumenist and working as chap- lain at St George’s while Jean-Louis Tauran was a seminarian at the Institut Catholique. Tauran went on to become a bishop and a cardinal – he is now President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue – but the friendship forged by their shared passion for church unity and the French Church endured until Greenacre’s death at the age of 80 last July. The Anglican had been a Canon Residentiary of Chichester Cathedral and Cardinal Tauran preached at his jubilee cel- ebration at Chichester Cathedral in 2005. The cardinal was back at the cathedral for Canon Greenacre’s Requiem Mass on Friday last week. He revealed that he had visited his friend three weeks before his death at his flat at the Charterhouse in London and found him “preparing himself for the great encounter with God with serenity and calm”. He said Fr Greenacre did not regard ecu- menism as a fashionable subject but as “a necessity for the credibility of the Gospel”. After retiring from Chichester, Fr Greenacre spent 10 years as Chaplain of St Michael’s, Beaulieu-sur-Mere on the French Riviera. Monks from the Abbeys of Bec-Hellouin and Chevetogne attended the Mass. His ashes were interred in the Paradise Lawn of the cathedral.


1 October 2011 | THE TABLET | 17


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