Roamer’s column

Last Sunday’s Telegraph carried a report about an electrician in the UK who faced the sack for displaying a small cross in the window of the company van.

His bosses claimed it may cause offence, but they allow photographs of Che Guevera in staff offices. Some offences are clearly worse than others – Che Guevera ‘yes’; Christ ‘no’ – making it clear that offence is in the eye of the beholder.

The incident has shown up once again the intolerance of self-appointed liberals or atheists who simply choose not to understand that once illiberal actions are allowed they will be followed by more illiberal ones.

“Once banning Christian symbols becomes accepted practice,” wrote Cristina Odone the following day, “the rejection of Christian beliefs is next… I fear intolerant atheists will not be satisfied until they’ve driven faith underground... Meet you in thecatacombs.”

Recent, serious attempts in Malta to remove faith and belief and their expression from the public square are not leagues away from creating a seculardictatorship.

Seemingly endless remarks about what is touted as the necessary divorce of faith from public life, which is akin to saying that the State is the only arbiter in matters that affect every aspect of life of a society, including its moral dimension – a patently absurd and contentious assertion – are aimed at an undemocratic silencing of a large swathe of the electorate.

In the UK, you may recall, the rot was further compounded by a Labour spin doctor’s asinine remark: “We don’t do God”.

But back to the Cross; I was delighted to receive the 2010 winter edition of The Chesterton Review, not least because I came across a letter written by Pope John Paul I to Chesterton in 1971 (35 years after his death) and (seven years before the death of that laughing Pope).

It was published in the book Illustrissimi: Letters from Pope John Paul I. Addressed to Dear Chesterton, the letter referred to an Italian TV series on Fr Brown, ‘that unpredictable priest-detective’, and regretted that Prof. Lucifer, an atheist, and Michael, a monk (protagonists in GKC’s The Ball and the Cross) had yet to make their TVappearance.

That story kicked off with another, related by the monk to the professor when the airship in which they were travelling flew over St Paul’s Cathedral and Lucifer hurled blasphemy at the Cross; a story in which a man saw the Cross as a symbol of Christianity, a ‘symbol of savagery and unreason’.

His obsession grew to the extent that whenever he saw the Cross, which was everywhere, so demented had he become about its shape, be it ‘an interminable line of palings’ or his furniture, he would break it down or tear it up.

‘He burnt his house’, so mad had he become, ‘because it was made up of crosses. He was found in the river’.

Lucifer, the Pope reminded Chesterton, who was not in need of reminding, looked at the monk and asked whether the story was true and the monk said no, ‘It is a parable. It is a parable of you and all rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; butyou end up by breaking up the inhabitable world…’

Pope John Paul went on to remark that, “If you take away God, what remains and what does mankind become?... He alone, in fact, can give a satisfying answer to these three problems, which are the most important for everyone. Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?”

The non-believer, I suppose, must answer, “nowhere” to the second and third questions. Presumably logic demands that to the first he respond, “nobody”, and you cannot get more nihilistic than that.

This does not seem to perturb John Paul I, who points out that, “The one that many are fighting is not the true God, but the false idea of God that they have formed”, and, later, that the former “will become more and more loved… including by those who reject Him today, not because they are wicked… but because they look at Him from a mistaken point of view! Do they continue not to believe in Him? Then He answers: “I believe in you!”

No Cross, no Christianity

The worrisome aspect of attempts to banish the Cross from public life, from schools and hospitals – and vans! – is not that atheists wish this to come about – that is their stock in trade; it is more that believers are so lukewarm about the trend.

One of these was publicly proclaiming, from what seat of authority I know not, that too much was made in Malta about the Lautsi affair, and he would have us cool it.

This attitude is scandalous, rather like betraying one’s country and asking loyalists not to make too fine a point on the betrayal; not only scandalous but supine. For what purpose? To display one’s enlightenment, I suppose, itself a word betrayed.

I am writing about Catholics for whom tradition and orthodoxy are passé and who fail to take into account that both have been the cement of Church history; chipping away at this binding property is tantamount to placing the safety of that edifice in jeopardy.

They must explain to the remainder of us on what authority they base any opinion they hold on Catholic belief.

Their own? Give me tradition and the thrill of orthodoxy any time.

At the end of the day and, for that matter, at the beginning of each one, the Cross is central to the redemption story; without it and the figure of the God-Man who hung from it – not the effeminate crossless Christ some like to turn Him into – there would have been no Resurrection, and without that cosmic event, as St Paul points out with typical clarity and forthrightness, our faith is folly.

So, any and every effort to banish the Cross from our consciousness on the ground that it may offend non-believers or enemies, haters, of Catholicism, needs to be taken seriously, and as gravely, resisted at every turn.

Without the Cross there is no Christianity; without Christianity there is no God, and ‘in a world without God’, it has been argued, ‘evil and victimhood are the only absolutes’. Take a look at Communism and Fascism if you do not believe this.

‘There had to be a sequel’, wrote Malcom Muggeridge long before his conversion to Christian faith. ‘I quite see that. The man on the cross who had given up the ghost must rise from the dead as a living God: the Resurrection followed the Crucifixion as inevitably as night follows day. And, indeed, in a sense it clearly happened.

‘Otherwise, how should I, as a 20th-century nihilist who asks nothing better than to live out his days without any concern for God, living or dead, be worrying his head about this cross and a man who died on it two thousand years ago?’

This from a nihilist; yetChristians are to be found, here and abroad, ready to downplay the vitality of its private andpublic significance.

Another cuckoo bishop

Abroad, in the UK, Anglican churchmen, leaders, are preparing to carry out a hatchet job on their 4,600 faith-based schools.

A proposal to limit places for children of the Anglican communion to 10 per cent of each school’s population being made by no less a senior official than the Bishop of Oxford, chairman of the Church of England’s board of education.

The Rt Reverend John Pritchard seems to be incapable of seeing that such a move would lead to a radical change in the character of his Church’s faith schools, diminishing the proportion of believers to apercentage so low as to renderits schools ‘faceless’ as well as faithless.

No doubt this is in the name of multi-culturalism, an experiment that is regarded as having failed in a number of European countries, foremost among themGermany and the UK.

Christian belief in the UK, as in other countries, faces a crisis; watering it down by asking Church schools to keep the number of Christians in their classrooms down to a level that would perforce remove the Christian ethos from these schools (in the name of what?) sounds like an exercise in faith-murder.

How can a syllabus possibly cater for a student body that will necessarily be so various and mixed?

The dilution of the school’s Christian character can hardly be a blessing for an ailing religion, and some may regard it as a curse.

The Bishop of Oxford is unperturbed by this fatal possibility, unlike the director of education for the dioceses of Bradford,Rippon and Leeds, who went on record to remark that if the Church of England took such a stand, it “may be shooting itself in the foot”.

He and I seem to be disagreeing only on the seriousness of the self-inflicted wound; the Reverend Clive Sedgwick sees his Church walking wounded, most others see her as entering into terminal decline so fissiparous has that body become, so lacking in authority.

Postscript

As the leader of the Opposition continues to persist in quasi-diabolical error on the matter of Malta’s humanitarian response to legal or illegal immigrants facing death by drowning, I have to assume that he has not taken the advice I gave him last Sunday, specifically that he read the story of the Good Samaritan.

Perhaps he does not have the time to find it in the Gospel narrative; I’ll help: Luke, Ch. 10, verses 30-37.