Operation Enduring Freedom, while that against Iraq started as Operation Iraqi Freedom. However, it can never be our duty to simply accept the cant of propaganda. And, in particular, it can never be the role of the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II left us in no doubt. For him, war was a shadow casting darkness over all; it was the sower of hell. So why, Pat Gaffney asks, has the Church in this country been so conspicuous in its silence during the past 10 years as we sow hell over wider and wider fields? Who, if not the Church, will speak for the victims of conflict, the young, the elderly, the sick, the innocent, the soldier wanting to “develop himself”? A cherished aim of Naziism was to take
Christ down from the Cross. Their churches would replace the victimhood of crucifixes with Christ as a soldier brandishing a spear. The impossibility of that image shows the ter- rain Christianity enters when it approaches the armed forces. Not being the established national religion, Catholicism in Britain is uniquely placed to address the full horrors of war from a non-partisan position. Last Remembrance Sunday, therefore, I was uncomfortable to find myself travelling to a Mass where even the liturgy had been militarised. Former servicemen led prayers and a minute’s silence from the front. I am worried that what should be an unforgiving meditation on the true horror of war – a little girl speared by shrapnel, the grandfather slowly starving by the burnt-out home where he raised his now dead family, or a girl giving birth in a radioactive bomb crater – might become a matter of praying for “our” side.
a comfortable place to be.” He admitted war was a failure, but believed people’s anger about it should be aimed at the Government. “They’re the ones using the military for polit- ical purposes, for gain and wealth.” According to the chaplain, this misuse of the armed forces has been evident in Libya too, where the Prime Minister, David Cameron, was keen not only to keep our grip on oil reserves, but “to blood himself” as a leader. The chaplain never forgets that in war “all our energies are directed to firing guns and dropping bombs”. For him, his presence at the front is for those who find themselves in the murky world of military action – people like my close friend’s son, who I shall be pray- ing for on Remembrance Sunday, along with all victims of war. Yes, on this Remembrance Sunday I will
I
pray that this young man does not come home in a box or be the one to spear the little girl with shrapnel. Above all, I will pray that one day we will offer our highly talented but often disadvantaged youth a way to develop them- selves that does not involve the deathly mortgage of the Queen’s shilling.
■Jonathan Tulloch is a novelist and nature writer.
had a recent conversation with a serving forces chaplain, in which he accepted the difficulties of his position. “These are profoundly hard questions … it’s not
CHRISTOPHER HOWSE’S PRESSWATCH
‘God-hating audiences spend money to hear jokes against him. This suggests insecurity’
You might not think there would be much reward for a comedian best known for mocking God. For the faithful, his routine would be as uncomfortable as the racist Bernard Manning’s would have been to Pakistanis. For atheists, the obsession with God would be as uninteresting as extended mockery of train-spotters or some such interest group interested in an interest that you don’t find interesting. Yet Tim Minchin, an atheist brought up in Australia, wrote a long, self-indulgent piece in The Observer magazine about how his comedy routine went down in the Bible Belt of Texas. “We were concerned he might be burnt at the stake,” said the introduction. Of course, he wasn’t, because, by his estimate, 99 per cent of his audience agreed with him that Jesus was merely a “two-millennium-dead Middle-Eastern Jewish magician-preacher”. Minchin, a talented comic songwriter, sometimes appears on the television quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks, but often, because of his upbringing, misses the common cultural references that supply much of the show’s humour. He appears typical of a brand of stand-up comedian who entertains audiences so keen on hating the God in whose existence they do not believe that they pay money to spend an hour or two hearing jokes against him. This suggests a certain insecurity. I would suggest that all those who enjoyed Minchin’s smirking tour diary should read the article in the Sunday Times Magazine about the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Neither Christians nor atheists are admitted. The reality of Islam is not going to go away however much stand-up comedians laugh at any “Middle-Eastern magician-preacher”. Their audiences, like the rest of us, had better try to understand why. Understanding the alien can be laborious, though. I have, for example, little interest in Irish politics, precisely because it is played with such devotion and panache by the Irish. To me it seems
like the game of bridge: unlikely to repay the effort required to reach a decent standard of appreciation. But a friend had remarked that
the Irish press seemed uninterested in the news of the closing of the country’s embassy to the Holy See. Perhaps, he suggested, this reflected national disenchantment with the Vatican. Yet when I looked, there seemed to be acres of coverage. No doubt the timing of the news, just before the weekend, had damped down some immediate political reaction. By Monday, Enda Kenny, the Prime Minister, was reacting “angrily” to suggestions that the closure was for any other than economic reasons (to save €1.25 million a year). But the press had already spent two days discussing it as another symptom of Mr Kenny’s anger over the Cloyne report into clerical sex abuse in the Cork Diocese. In a leader, The Irish Times said that “there is no escaping a decline in ‘crozier power’ that is reflected by the Government’s decision”, but it advocated continuing good relations with representatives of the Catholic Church in Ireland “because of their role in the education, health care and spiritual guidance of citizens”. In the Irish Independent Mary
Kenny commented that, as General de Gaulle once said, “Nations do not have friends – they have interests.” Was this latest move, she asked, “the politics of Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Face?” She wondered if Ireland was repeating its error in 1949 when it severed connections with the Commonwealth – which had appalled De Valera. Indeed, the news pages soon reported remarks by De Valera’s grandson, Eamon O Cuiv, the deputy leader of Fianna Fail, that the Government should have “the guts” to admit it was a political move. The Irish Examiner observed
that Joseph Stalin had “famously derided the power of the Vatican by asking how many divisions the Pope had. Ironically, it was a pope who later did much to undermine the structures built by Stalin.” So it recommended that the embassy decision be reconsidered. As an outsider, I find the malaise of the Church in Ireland depressing. Newspaper readership in Ireland remains higher than in most European countries, and one can only hope that the bitter press controversy surrounding the Church may allow it one day to develop in a renewed spirit.
■Christopher Howse is an assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph.
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