AN OUTSIDE VIEW

A couple of years ago I gave up Facebook for Lent. I have never logged onto it again. I had done myself a great favour, as it was mostly a waste of time. I often got angry and said things that I would never have said to anyone in their presence. Quite a lot of the disagreement on Facebook was about the Catholic liturgy. Giving it up silenced me on a matter I think is important. Many of my Catholic friends, and many others I do not know personally, spend much time and energy bewailing the state of the church in general, and Pope Francis in particular, either “live” or on the internet. Francis-bashing has become a full-scale industry. Giving it up for Lent could be a worthwhile and rewarding sacrifice. I did so myself about a year ago simply because I ran out of energy. This has turned out to have brought particular graces. I would recommend it to others; the coming Lent would be a good opportunity.

Brussels has warned that it stands ready to retaliate and potentially open up a transatlantic trade war if the US delivers on apparent threats to restrict European imports . The mad prospect of an orgy of mutual self-harm opens up. The main effect of the protectionist policies that Trump is promoting will be to cause unnecessary expense and inconvenience to US consumers and producers, with the exception of those in the protected industries, a minority of the total. If Delta Airlines had been prevented from purchasing the Bombardier aircraft it chose, the losers would have been Delta Airlines and the airline’s passengers. The EU leadership seems to be unaware that if EU exporters are on the receiving end of another country’s protectionist policy, the least damaging policy is to do nothing. Retaliatory sanctions compound the damage. It is bad enough that the Single Market already restricts US goods. It makes no sense to create, deliberately, difficulties for people inside the EU who ...

The high altitude wedding ceremony conducted by the Pope has, predictably, attracted criticism from the many conservative Catholics who run blogs and websites complaining about the state of the Catholic church and criticising the Pope. This is washing dirty laundry in public. Christians should not do it. It gives scandal, in the real sense of the word: it sets up a stumbling block against belief. It is also spiritually damaging to those who engage in the sport. Criticism has been going on for the past 45 years, but until the election of the present Pope, the primary focus was not the Pope but the liturgy, following the reforms of Vatican II. What seems to have been lost in most of this criticism is that these reforms were the outcome of a movement whose origins can be traced at least three-quarters of a century before that; it was in 1910 that Pope Pius X found it necessary to make clergy swear an oath against Modernism, which indicates the scale of the ferment of unrest. Thus Vatica...

The following piece is an edited and updated version of a submission I wrote in 2013 as part of a submission to my local parish council. Although nothing was done at the time, the Parish Priest subsequently adopted the general principles. In the very different circumstances of my present parish, it was a courageous thing to do. He seems to have little support from most of his parishioners, who are dominated by ex-Lutherans and want in the Catholic church what they have always had in their former Lutheran home. Worse still, he receives no support, and from some, outright opposition, from his fellow clergy. Nor is there any support from the Diocese, whose approach to liturgy is pick-and-mix, which rules out the Traditional form of the Mass at Diocesan events. Nor, of course, is there support from Rome. St Mary Magdalen’s is the city centre parish in Brighton, Sussex. It was the second Catholic parish in the town. The church building opened in stages as it was completed between 1861 and...

An online petition signed by 10,000 people has asked Cardinal Robert Sarah, the Vatican’s liturgy chief, to intervene, saying the instrument is “inadequate” for the space. I noticed that myself at the Christmas Eve broadcast of Midnight Mass, though I was more put out by the dropping of the Gregorian setting for the Midnight Mass Alleluia, when something else was sung instead. The organ, donated by the American Alleyn Organ Company, was first used for Mass on Christmas Eve, replacing the Basilica’s main pipe organ, which officials believe is unsatisfactory. How about not having an organ at all? It is not as if Catholic liturgical music requires one. Article in Catholic Herald

One of the arguments put up for the UK’s membership of the EU is the gravity model - that trade depends on proximity. However, trade also depends on factors such as the presence of intervening oceans and the effects of language, legal systems, traditions, cultural and family ties. Members of ethnic groups eg Jews, Chinese, Indians - can easily trade with their friends and family half way round the world. The gravity model also denies comparative advantage. If you want grapes in January you have to get them from somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Comparative advantage also works against the UK in regard to trade with continental Europe, due to the costs of transport. A manufacturer in Germany is perfectly placed for overland delivery to half a billion customers. The UK producer has sixty million within overland delivery range. To reach the rest, the goods must be sent over the sea. Only the south-east corner of the UK is geographically close to continental Europe. Mos...

An American general, Robert Neller, the US marine corps commandant, warned US troops stationed in Norway at the end of last year that he felt “there’s a war coming”. His spokesperson later said the general did not believe a battle imminent, but was stressing the need “to be ready for the full spectrum of conflict”. This is frightening. It seems that military considerations are apparently taking precedence over political and economic ones in Eastern Europe. Most of the problems are residual from the break-up of the Soviet Union. In part, they have arisen from the mis-location of borders eg Ukraine, the boundary of which was drawn up at a time when there was never any thought that what was a state of the Soviet Union might become an independent country. Countries which were annexed by the Soviet are a different matter, although historically there were always significant Russian populations within the Baltic countries. In the years after 1938, however, there was effectively a “plant...