Roamer's column

It was on Palm Sunday, 1984, that Pope John Paul II asked a youth meeting in Rome to return in 1985 to celebrate that year's Palm Sunday. The response was exciting and the decision was taken to hold the first World Youth Day in 1986. 'His early papal pilgrimages in Italy and abroad', wrote his biographer George Weigel, 'had convinced him that a pastoral strategy of "accompaniment" with young people was as valid for a pope as it had been for a fledgling priest."

Off he went, every two years, to Buenos Aires, Santiago de Compostela, Czestochowa, Denver, Manila, Paris, Rome in 2000 and for his last visit, a visibly tiring man, Canada. Was it here or in Rome that a young man darted on to the stage and flung his arms around Pope John Paul - to the astonishment of the security guards?

Wherever it was, he had set the tone for 'accompaniment' and for challenging youth to witness to Christ in the "never-ending battle being aged for our dignity and identity as free, spiritual beings... Do not be afraid to go out in the streets and into public places" (this in Denver!) "like the first Apostles who preached Christ and the good news of salvation in the squares of cities, towns and villages. (This) is the time to preach (the Gospel) from the rooftops".

Pope Benedict, 78 when he became pope, kept up what had become a tradition by going to Cologne for his first World Youth Day. Would this shy intellectual, this man with an aura of gravitas, evoke the same response from youngsters, people wondered? As it turned out, he did and as his papacy unfolds his concern for the liturgy - and, therefore, for worship, and therefore, for the Eucharist at the centre of our belief - is equalled only by his anxiety for man's and woman's dignity in an age when this is being held to ransom by the media, the trivialisation of sexuality, and by his fear for the way in which some countries in Europe are being encouraged to turn their back on God and the religion that once formed and informed them.

Now 81 and only two or three months after a hectic, hugely successful visit to the US, where he believes the counter culture to the current culture of death will start, he has flown across the world to Australia. Here he will spend all of next week, resting the first three days and kicking off, Wednesday I think, with a boat-cade across Sydney Harbour watched and cheered by more than a quarter of a million people.

A tremendous emphasis is being made on catechesis - Vintage Benedict - and 250 locations have been set up across the length and breadth of Sydney for those who have flown out on this pilgrimage of faith. The climax will take place over the weekend - an evening vigil with the Pope on Saturday, preceded by the Stations of the Cross on Friday and followed by Mass on Sunday morning.

A motley group of nutty characters have announced their intention to hand out condoms to the pilgrims gathered in Sydney. This bizarre, typically offensive decision will no doubt encourage an appropriate measure of derision.

I cuffed the Lord Chief Justice

Today I pay homage and bow my column in the direction of Sir Igor Judge, recently appointed to the highest post in the judiciary of England and Wales - Lord Chief Justice. It could not have been an easy climb to the top. I need hardly say, even as I declare an interest, that his appointment was well merited and well received.

My nephew will take on his duties with that marvellous sense of humility that has run like a thread throughout his career, from barrister to Silk to the Bench and onwards ever upwards, to the High Court, the Court of Appeal, to become the first President of the Queen's Bench Division and the first Head of Criminal Justice.

I have never sat at any court over which he presided but understand from those who have done so that he does so with dignity, integrity and the calmness that comes from an honest and independent mind. Although he took many worries home with him during his career, he never allowed these to disturb the happy family life he and his wife Judith created for their children and grandchildren.

Needless to say I had a hand in the rise and rise of the Lord Chief Justice. We went to the same school, I an uncle already at the age of six. I once noticed he was struggling with some Latin prep work he had been set and took it into my head to help him by, among other things, testing his knowledge of the plural of irregular nouns, his handling of tough verbs and his way with the odd, cunning subjunctive.

When he failed he would receive a little cuff on the head (verboten today in countries that have welcomed abortion without a thought for the severed members of an embryo) and a cruel remark that uncles, even the nicest, sometimes make. After a 10-minute private lesson during which he mangled the perfect tense of fero and tripped over a couple of banal ablatives, I told him he was being pretty stupid. He took it on the chin; as he nearly did a cricket ball I hurled at him once when he could scarcely wield a bat and, ambitious little fellow, already had his eyes on Lords.

There are times when I feel pangs of remorse about all this; other times when I feel justified. Listen to what happened to Peter Cook, who had no benevolent uncle to guide him through the Latin thicket. Fictitiously, it is true, but in that brilliant 1961 revue, Beyond the Fringe, he confessed that, "Yes, I could have been a judge but I never had the Latin, never had the Latin for the judging, I just never had sufficient of it to get through the rigorous judging exams. They're noted for their rigour. People came staggering out saying 'My God, what a rigorous exam' - and so I became a miner instead'.

I sometimes feel that a few cuffs on the head saved my nephew from becoming a miner. When I rang up to congratulate him, he recalled the cuff-laden Latin 'lessons'; which made me squirm a bit, I tell you. But he also added that my remark had rankled to the extent that he determined he would spend the rest of his life proving me wrong, which he did, which he did, demonstrating with quasi-geometric precision, just how salutary punishment at the right time for the right reason can be.

His first school, St Edward's, must be proud of its pupil; as must his second, The Oratory near Reading whither I would travel from Sandhurst to provide him with chocolates and nutrients that did not feature much in the diet of public schools in those days; and for all I know, still do not. There I checked on his progress at cricket; this, too, I taught him, the hallway at home a bowler's run-up, the tiled passageway in the garden as fast a wicket as any he was ever likely to meet and faster. This tough regime explains, in part at least, his captaincy of his school X1 at Lord's.

A bit of Latin and a cricket, I hear you say, hardly the stuff from which Lord Chief Justices are made. I know, I know; the barrister from Magdalene (Cambridge) where he passed with flying colours plus some, would have made it without the cuff and the chocolate and the garden-tiled wicket, but it is nice to think they helped in however infinitesimal a manner.

There is an electrifying moment in Robert Bolt's magnificent play, A Man for All Seasons, when Thomas More, beautifully played by Paul Scofield, is trying to knock it into the brains of his family that he would even give the Devil benefit of law. "What would you do"? he asks his excitable son-in-law, Roper. "Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?' Through every law in England, the impetuous Roper relies. "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat from coast to coast - Man's Laws not God's - and if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"

In conversation, Igor once defended the law - and laws - along those lines, their necessity even while recognising that the law can sometimes be an ass. But essentially, Man's laws, unless legislated in a manner that threatens freedom, keep us free; a sure echo of the Apostle Paul.

His mother Rosa is, naturally, over the moon as would have been his father Raymond had he been living at this hour; so are his children and his sister Tanya and her husband Ian; so is the whole family; and so should St Edward's be that one of its pupils reached, deservedly, such prestigious heights. Malta, too, is honoured by this achievement.