Frankie and Benny — Popes, Profs and Pragmatics.

Hope springs eternal in Rome, with prayers and good wishes from around the world. I felt a big flutter of positive energy, watching Pope Francis’ first hour in his new job. He seemed immensely calm but warm, centred in the moment and modest. I can’t imagine him in Mister Punch Prada gear, a plus point for me and future Vatican tourists who might otherwise not be able to tell which man in a white cassock was which.

It looks as though there will be no confusing them. Circumstantially, people feel more at ease with an all-rounder. Historians may look out for signs of transition from the rule of an intellectual to that of a perfectly educated and intelligent man who seems confident, relaxed and centred in the moment.

Intellectual giants always, usually unintentionally, intimidate others. Nobody loves a Big Brain Alien. More significantly, Intellectuals inhabit a large room stocked with big ideas, that can become their primary reality.
To someone with a powerful electric screwdriver every protusion is a screw. This can deliver quick results with some protrusions, but others, like nails and boils, remain stubbornly resistant.

Intellectual giants see the progress of the world as the evolution of big ideas. A process of syllogism, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, drives their big brainy world, the one that really matters. Other people start from the other end and deal with their in-trays in more pedestrian but effective ways. Things move on because they were dealt with, and everyone else feels life is more than an eternal seminar group.

To intellectual giants, issues arising from changing sexual mores are challenges to sources of authority, revisionist mountains made of molehills, waves beating against the rocks of the eternal shore. The progress of civilisation is at stake. To a priest struggling with imposed celibacy, or a young lad contemplating hanging himself from very shame, all the Big Ideas around this mean nothing, nor to the millions whose gut instincts drive them, often unwittingly, one way or the other. Failure to see this whole picture holistically makes the puzzle impossible.

It would not surprise me if the new Pope's dogmatic beliefs were basically to the right in terms of issues, but I would expect him to be less imprisoned by them. A leader with a strong sense of pragmatic reality and faith that is concrete rather than abstract, shrewd rather than subtle, could do much good. The honeymoon will be over soon enough.

I’m trying to enjoy it hopefully, and the parallel process that is unfolding in the Church of England...

Human Rights Relativity

In a week which has seen all kinds of positive and negative comment about bishops, the Pope and Human Rights legislation stumbling through the House of Lords just now, I think we need to stand back and consider what human rights are and what they aren’t.

Civilised people need to have some way of measuring standards of behaviour that translates across culture from one context to another, indicating possible abuse. Clear Human Rights legislation is a good way for civil society to express some shared values, and measure where behaviour falls short. Pulling the whole ragbag of legislation from the past forty years together into a coherent whole is obviously a Good Thing Too. So far, so good.

But which Human Rights? How? More partcularly, how do you balance them? Human Rights are usually framed in terms of a Big Social Good, and this makes them seem like absolutes, which of course they can never really be.

Translating high ideals into the down and dirty world of Monday morning, where stuff happens, is an inexact science.

All Human Rights however idealistically framed, always need to be qualified, both by the constraints of reality, and other human rights. This is the nature of freedom arguments — my freedom to express who I am by practising my Euphonium is qualified by your right to a good night’s sleep. However excellent each notional right may be in the abstract, either, pushed to its logical extreme in the real world would cancel out the other.

So to current concerns. Equality and Diversity are both really good things, in the abstract. That means Discrimination and Homogenization are really bad things, in the abstract. Now try and apply that lot, and make laws to universalise the deal, and you will need to make a few cute calls. Doesn't mean it shouldn’t be done, just that it’ll be messy. Discussion along the way to deciding how to word equality legislation needs to be robust and realistic, not knee-jerk and generalised.

Every position has to be proofed against some other positive right, or the result will almost certainly be abusive.

That being the case slanging matches about whether Human Rights are a Good Thing or a Bad Thing are futile and childish. The Pope, left wing right wing, whatever, anyone has as much right as anyone else to express a serious point of view about the way the balance between Equality and Liberty looks as though it’s being struck in the UK.

The liberty of the individual to believe or not as they judge right, like the liberty of the individual to be treated fairly, are both precious things that can only be preserved if we are willing to give serous attention to working out how they relate to each other. One lot may have to swallow the uncongenial truth that the extent to which any of its people accepts any organisation’s dogma is ultimately voluntary not legally enforceable, and the other the equally uncongenial truth that illiberal liberalism is an Oxymoron.

What hath Kampala to do with LA?

Image by Catholic Church (England and Wales) via Flickr

I can see why people compare the speedy Lambeth statement about the nomination of a gay bishop in Los Angeles unfavourably with its more apparently leisurely behind-the-scenes reaction to proposed draconian anti-gay laws in Uganda. As one Guardian commentator puts it.

I simply fail to understand how Rowan Williams can say to the liberals don't do that, you'll annoy the right, we must avoid schism at all costs, while saying to the right, um, yes, whatever, please don't go.

Of course there are boringly obvious reasons why the two questions at issue don’t quite square up alongside each other: The Los Angeles one is an in-house bishoppy thing, where the Ugandan issue involves weighing into a touchy foreign legislature, incredibly still on the rebound from Empire after 47 years. It would be a bit odd if both were responded to in the same way. Still, the squirmfulness of all this is unavoidable.

A part of me would love the Archbishop to swing in, Pope style, with quick auto-da-fés all round, preferably enforcing my own eminently reasonable views of both matters. Bang a few heads together. Send the Ugandans to Los Angeles for six months, and the Angelinos to Uganda. That may not be such a bizarre idea... However, bishops in autocephalous churches don’t do autos-da-fé. Back in the third century, one Bishop of Rome who tried it on got this flea in his ear from Firmilian of Caesarea:

I am justly indignant with Stephen’s obvious and manifest silliness, that he so boasts of his position...

That messy, mainly voluntarist place, is where the C of E has been since the Reformation, increasingly choosing the ecclesiastical methods of St Paul and the early Church rather than those of Pope Innocent III and the Holy Inquisition. It’s to be hoped, however, that all proceed with open eyes — remembering the simple fact that the motive for anti-discriminatory behaviour, as well as the deep revulsion people here feel about the Ugandan proposals, are moral objections with missional implications, not just some taste or lifestyle choice...