Ten years ago, Jordan Peterson exploded into a culture increasingly aware of what a massive failure the post war liberal project was. He spoke of meaning and myth, story and people, he travelled across continents and into various podcast studios, all while eating only meat. He had certianly hit on something. Since then an extraordinary amount of time has been spent both on and offline discussing how to save Western civilisation. Conferences were convened, political movements established, economic theories advanced and speeches delivered about restoring prosperity, rebuilding communities and recovering the values upon which our nations were founded. Donald Trump and JD Vance speak of Making America Great (Again), while organisations such as the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship with whom Peterson is associated, bring together thinkers and public figures to consider how the West might recover its confidence and purpose. Much of what is discussed is important, but listening to Pope Leo XIV’s extraordinarily beautiful homily in Uruguay (delivered 18 years to the day since I gave birth) I was struck by something which ought to be obvious, yet is all too often absent from our grand conversations about civilisational renewal. We cannot rebuild a Christian civilisation without rebuilding Christian families, and we cannot rebuild Christian families if we are commited to the sterile promises of the devil who tempts us to believe that there are a host of things that need fixing before we have babies.

Pope Leo, the 267th successor of St Peter, visible head of Christ’s Church on earth, spoke not about economic growth, immigration, productivity or political reform, but about mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, family devotions, the sacrifices made without recognition, and the faith handed down through generations. He spoke of the women who had kept open a path to God when others had abandoned it, and of the men who modelled what it meant to be a husband and father; suffering, sacrificing and kneeling before their Creator. He reminded us that the transmission of the faith is not the work of governments, institutions or clever programmes, but of ordinary men and women living extraordinary fidelity in the most ordinary circumstances.

I couldn’t help but think of my own mother, an Irish Catholic who had inherited the faith of her fathers. She lived to see the culture which had formed her turn increasingly hostile towards the Church she loved. Ireland, once so thoroughly Catholic that the faith was woven into the very fabric of life, underwent a transformation which was not merely secular but, bitterly antagonistic towards its religious inheritance. Beliefs once regarded as sacred became objects of ridicule, and fidelity to the Church was increasingly treated as something embarrassing, even shameful. My mother watched this happen. She watched people fall away, her own brothers and sisters abandoning the Church and jumping aboard the bad ship progress. Yet she never surrendered what she knew to be true. I know this wasn’t easy for her. I remember her being ridiculed, even by memebrs of her own family. In a hand scrawled note I found written to the 17 year old rebellious me who had absorbed a lot of worldly influences, she had said “My darling girl, you have been lied to. Everything the world is offering is false and will let you down, but God will never let you down. One day you will see this more clearly than you are able to now”. That I do see it now, is largely down to suffering. Something that we are told we must eradicate.

After her death, I inherited my mother’s breviaries and missals, along with those of my Irish grandfather. As I pray with them today, I think of my pious old Grandfather trying to find a bit of space to pray while the children and grandchildren rushed about him. I remember my mother sitting in a little corner of the house that she had carved out for prayer, candle lit, reading the Psalms and praising God at the beginning and end of each day. And now, here I am, almost 50 years later, turning the same pages she did, offering the same Psalms of thanksgiving to God that generations have offered before me. As St John Henry Newman writes: “I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work."

There is something profoundly moving about holding the books through which another soul spent a lifetime speaking to God. Their pages are tangible evidence of a fidelity which outlived the people who practised it. I cannot know every petition offered, every sorrow carried into prayer, every anxious appeal made for children and grandchildren whose futures the petitioners could not see. But I know that they prayed, and I know that my own children, living in 2026, remain close to Christ. I believe with all my heart that these things are connected. The prayers of my mother and grandfather did not cease to bear fruit when their earthly lives ended, and neither will mine. What they planted in faith, often in darkness and without consolation, continues to grow in a generation they could scarcely have imagined.

My mother knew that suffering comes to us whether we welcome it or not, that no amount of comfort, prosperity or technological advancement can remove the Cross from human existence. But she also knew that suffering united to Christ is not wasted. She offered up her own considerable sorrows for me. In a world increasingly organised around the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of personal fulfilment, she understood the profoundly Christian truth that love is sacrificial, that suffering can become redemptive when joined to the sacrifice of Calvary, and that the greatest gifts we leave our children may be those purchased through tears they never knew we shed. No Cross, no Crown.

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?…No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

Romans 8:35-38

This is why Pope Leo’s words moved me so deeply. He spoke directly to those mothers who had taught their children to pray, only to watch them abandon the faith, and who are left wondering whether their efforts had been futile. My own mother died, not knowing, but believing that hers were not. Recalling St Monica, whose prayers accompanied the long conversion of her son Augustine, Pope Leo reminded them that the seed can grow without the sower knowing how. What an immense consolation to parents who have spent years praying for children who seem lost to the world. What a magnificent vindication of the quiet, hidden lives of faithful mothers and fathers whose sacrifices will never be celebrated at a conference or recognised by the architects of our political future.

There is a place for politics, economics and the serious work of governing nations. But no government can manufacture the love of a mother who prays for her children, or a father who kneels before God, and no political movement can produce the supernatural life of grace. We speak endlessly about the culture we wish to recover, while forgetting that culture is what grows out of the lives we lead. If we want a Christian civilisation, we must live as Christians. We must marry, welcome children, raise them in the faith, pray together, sacrifice for one another and carry Christ into the world. We cannot outsource to ‘experts’ the work entrusted to parents.

My mother never set out to save Western civilisation. She wanted to save the souls of her children. But that is precisely how a civilisation is saved: one family, one generation, one faithful soul at a time, through prayers whose fruits may not be seen until long after the hands that hold the prayer book have grown cold.

As St Paul wrote:

“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24–25

We cannot talk our way back to Christendom; we have to live our way back into it.

Written by Dr. Anthony McCarthy

It’s not every day that a declaration from the Chair of the British Medical Association Medical Ethics Committee reminds one of existentialism – especially in its Sartrean form.

First, some background. Dr Andrew Green told a Health Committee at Stormontin 2025 that, “medicine is no longer practiced in a paternalistic fashion, it’s the doctor’s task to illuminate the paths that patients can then choose to follow…”

He went on to say, citing a BMA safeguarding toolkit, that “Competent adults retain the right to make decisions about how they wish to direct their lives. Neglecting or violating these decision-making rights, even where the intention is to protect the individual, can itself be a form of abuse.”

Such words are, on the face of it, unobjectionable. After all, who could be against ‘autonomy’ and the respect that should go with it? And who could be in favour of ‘paternalism’, which infantilises us patients and thereby affronts our dignity – with the latter surely bound up in some way with the fact we are autonomous beings?

Yet before embracing such views wholesale, it is useful to look at how far Dr Green himself is prepared to take them. He recently defended in print the decision of his Committee to issue startling guidance – about which more below – on ‘caring’ for patients wanting to kill themselves by stopping eating and drinking: patients who may or may not be dying, or even ill, but are certainly intending to end their own lives.

Suicide, that is, a deliberate act to destroy permanently one’s own life and health, is in Green’s view no longer necessarily something for doctors to oppose vigorously and counsel against – indeed, to do so will perhaps constitute, in the words he quotes above, “a form of abuse.” As long ago as 2021, the British Medical Association dropped its official opposition to legislation in favour of assisted suicide via use of lethal drugs (often euphemistically termed ‘assisted dying’) and adopted a ‘neutral’ stance. Should Parliament decide one day to legalise assisted suicide, as it very nearly did this year, the BMA would seemingly accommodate this decision. Such a change in medical practice would, of course, change the very meaning of medicine and extirpate a keyprohibition of the Oath which gave birth to medicine as a profession.

That ‘neutral’ stance married to a view of autonomy which presumptively favours autonomous decisions regardless of the values they may undermine runs through the BMA guidance on the practice known as ‘Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking’ (VSED).

In my article I looked at some of the grotesquery contained within the BMA Guidance, which Dr Green utterly failed to address in his response. My purpose here is to examine the philosophical assumptions that pave the way to such insidious advice to doctors.

The word ‘autonomy’ notoriously encompasses a wide range of meanings. It may mean something like ‘free will’, the faculty of spontaneous choosing which distinguishes us from animals. Yet autonomy can also mean something more substantive, more akin to ‘rational self-control’, in other words the ability to resist urges or impulses. For Aristotle, this kind of freedom is associated with the virtuous man habitually oriented to choosing the good, understood in terms of human flourishing.

St Augustine for his part talks of freedom in terms of release from the bondage of sin. He wisely pronounced, in regard to liberty, that a man has as many masters as he has vices. In other words, self-control – and for him, God’s grace – are needed so that we may be freed from the “vice-like” grip of self-destructive habits. The person is seen as directed toward spiritual ends, with liberty understood in terms of natural law – constrained by a divine order which can be apprehended naturally.

That view of the world can be contrasted with a newer dispensation which tends to dismiss emotions such as shame or guilt as themselves enemies of “freedom” and self-realisation. Such a view has been particularly dominant in the sexual realm. The person, on this picture, is understood in terms of preference-satisfaction and emancipation from what is believed to be unduly ‘constraining’.

The most extreme version of such a view is arguably that propounded by Jean-Paul Sartre. For him, even considerations of prudence and rationality are to be seen as undue ‘constraints’ on our free choice, let alone any awe-inducing injunction from above. Rather, the supreme value becomes ‘authenticity’ understood without reference to rationality or immutable principles. Quite why this particular value, that of impeccant freedom, should trump all others is not clear. On what moral grounds is ‘inauthenticity’ to be condemned, given that our freely chosen acts often reflect our grasp of values which are not our own whimsical or spontaneous creations?

The over-emphasis on freedom seen as lack of constraint comes at a very great cost. For it neglects the very reality of all other values. By sanctifying choice it de-sanctifies the ordinary world of value, which no longer makes any serious claim on us.

Such views have acted as a yeast in our society over a very long period of time, supported by economic and political assumptions. You can see the results everywhere. Look at the media coverage of the recent Russell Brand rape trial and you will see that sexual ethics is largely confined to questions of whether free consent has been obtained. Other values associated with sexual activity tend to disappear from view, at least where they can’t be utilised selectively to punish yesterday’s degenerate icon. But if you minimise all other values atstake, don’t be surprised if those in the grip of multiple vices viewed indulgently by the media and their peers are not formed in such a way as to be especially careful even about consent.

Self-proclaimed liberal polities which exoterically reject the idea that they exist to make people virtuous should not be surprised by such an outcome. Having relentlessly promoted a culture of vice, under the cover of sexual ‘autonomy’, such polities scramble to assert inconsistently on certain forms of virtuous behaviour, provided that those forms do not in any way threaten the ‘new dispensation’ that they themselves imposed.

That autonomy uber alles has become increasingly the mantra of our medical institutions is perhaps more shocking, given medicine’s long tradition of respect for the inherent value of the person’s living body – his or her life and health. For by taking a neutral stance on the question of assisted suicide the BMA made clear that helping someone deliberately destroy their own life and health was not seen as antithetical to the practice of medicine. As well as undermining medicine, this emphasis on a haughty and unmoored autonomy drains away the moral weight of any situation, thereby eliminating the very ductility in responding to moral reality which autonomy requires.

And, just as Jean-Paul Sartre ended up supporting the most totalitarian ideologies as a result of his existentialism, so those who emphasise ‘autonomy’ above all things end up issuing Guidance to medical staff which tells them how to help patients prepare for suicide by, for example, reducing their caloric intake as a prelude to dehydrating and starving themselves to death. Refusal to violate certain values (and indeed one’s own caring instincts as a doctor) is now viewedas abuse of the only remaining value, namely ‘autonomy’ – even if that ‘autonomy’ is aimed precisely at the destruction of the value of one’s own life. A warped understanding of the value of autonomy results in the dissolution ofmany values, including autonomy in its highest form: one guided by the very objective human goods from which the value of autonomy ultimately derives.

Dr Anthony McCarthy is Director of the Bios Centre. The Centre has just released a Conscientious Objection Toolkit for healthcare professionals which can be accessed here.

The moment we placed the ‘I’ at the centre of the universe, morality ceased to be something we were obliged to obey and became something we were entitled to invent. Russell Brand is both a perpetrator and a casualty of this revolution.

We have grown up in a culture which has taught us that, in matters of sexual intimacy, consent is both necessary and sufficient. Provided two people agree to whatever sexual activity they have in mind, there is nothing more to be said about it. And in arriving at this extraordinary position, we have quietly dispensed with an understanding of sex which governed Western civilisation for centuries: that sexual intimacy is sacred, that it belongs within marriage, and that it is not merely something we do with our bodies, but something which touches the very essence of who we are, with consequences that reach far beyond the body and into the depths of the soul.

I have been thinking about this recently, having returned to some of the films and television programmes I watched in the 1980s and 1990s. I remembered them as rather innocent, even milquetoast, especially compared with the entertainment available today. The rom-coms and the sitcoms belonged to a more wholesome age? But watching them again, I was struck by how much of what we now take for granted was already being carefully established in the popular imagination. We were being taught a new understanding of relationships and sex, which came wrapped in humour, romance and attractive characters, such that we barely noticed.

Take Sleepless in Seattle, the 1993 romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. In one scene, Sam, a widower, explains to his eight-year-old son why he is dating a woman whom he has no immediate intention of marrying. “This is what single people do”, he tells his son. “They try other people on to see how they fit”. He speaks of people with the casual indifference of a man trying on clothes, as though they were objects to be picked up, tried out and discarded when they no longer suited him. And perhaps that is precisely what people had become in the popular imagination. The old moral order had been turned on its head. Where once we understood that things were to be used and people were to be loved, we had begun to love things and use people. We try on shoes, coats, dresses, and if we like them, we buy them. If we don’t, we put them back on the rail. And here, in this apparently innocent romantic comedy, a father is explaining to his young son that this is how adult relationships work. People are to be tried on. The other person is presented as a consumer choice, to be tested for suitability rather than approached as someone whose dignity demands more.

Or consider the film 10 Things I Hate About You, the 1999 teenage romantic comedy based loosely on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. There are sexual references throughout, jokes about virginity and erections, and a scene in which a penis is drawn on a teenage boy’s face. These things are played for laughs. But what does a young teenager, who may never have entertained such thoughts, make of them? What happens when something which ought to be approached with modesty is made into a joke? We tend to think of corruption as something dramatic, something which announces itself with a great flourish of wickedness. More often it happens quietly. A joke here, an innuendo there, a suggestion that everyone is doing something, that only the hopelessly naive or socially inadequate would object to. Eventually the young person ceases to be shocked, and then ceases to wonder whether there was ever anything to be shocked about.

This is how a culture is formed. Not simply by the laws it passes (though that is another story), but by the stories it tells. Lord Byron understood the power of an origin story. In his 1821 drama Cain: A Mystery, he takes the familiar biblical account and turns its moral universe upside down. Lucifer is no longer the deceiver who leads mankind into rebellion against God, but a sympathetic champion of reason, freedom and enlightenment, while God Himself is cast as a cosmic tyrant demanding obedience. The characters remain recognisable, but their moral identities have been reversed. Evil is made attractive while rebellion becomes a virtue. And this is the extraordinary power of storytelling. A story need not persuade us openly that good is evil and evil is good. It need only teach us to admire the one and recoil from the other. Isn’t this what we see coming out of that cesspit called Hollywood (and the BBC, Channel 4 and other equally disgusting filth producers)?

90’s sitcom Friends was not a programme about the destruction of sexual morality. None of us would have been allowed to watch it if it was billed that way. It was a programme about six attractive, amusing young adults living in New York, and navigating life together. That was precisely its power. Promiscuity was not presented as a moral revolution. It was simply life. And in the life of a young adult, you hook up…often…or else you are a weirdo who has only ever slept with 6 people before the age of 30! The audience laughed, sympathised, identified, but most of all…..absorbed.

And here we are, thirty years later, in a society where it is considered perfectly normal for people to meet in a nightclub, or through an app on their phones, and to have sex before they know anything about one another.

How did this become normal? More importantly, why do we think it is acceptable?

Consider what courtship meant to previous generations. In the 1940s and 1950s, and certainly before, there was a widely understood distinction between courting someone and having sexual relations with them. Courtship was a period of discernment, during which a man and woman came to know one another with marriage as the intended destination. There were conventions governing behaviour, expectations about modesty, and often the involvement of families and communities. A young man might call at a girl’s home, meet her parents, take her to a dance or the cinema, accompany her to church, write letters, and gradually establish whether they were suited to marriage.

Of course, people sinned. The past was not populated exclusively by saints, but there is an enormous difference between a society in which people fail to live up to a moral standard and one in which the standard itself has been abandoned. In the former, the sinner knows that he has fallen short of something good. In the latter, he is encouraged to believe that there is nothing to fall short of.

We have not merely relaxed the rules of courtship. We have abolished the very idea that sexual intimacy should be governed by anything other than mutual agreement.

And so we arrive at the extraordinary sexual landscape of the twenty-first century, where young men and women are encouraged to regard their bodies as instruments of pleasure, where almost every imaginable sexual practice is available through pornography, and where sexual encounters with strangers are treated as an ordinary part of adult life. A woman may meet a man in a nightclub, return to his home, and consent to a series of increasingly intimate acts, all too shocking to describe here, but see the Russell Brand case for details. Neither knows anything about the other’s character. They have not promised fidelity to one another, yet we are expected to regard this as an entirely unremarkable encounter between two consenting adults - it’s all ok, because she said ‘Yes’.

The only moral boundary our culture seems capable of recognising is the moment at which one person says no. That is simply insanity when the person saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ has been de-formed so badly by the culture around them.

Every single imaginable sexual act is regarded as morally acceptable until the moment consent is withdrawn, at which point we suddenly rediscover the language of moral outrage, violation and human dignity. But why only then? It is a curious moral logic, not unlike the one by which we can disregard the humanity of a child throughout the nine months he spends in his mother's womb, only to insist upon his dignity and rights the moment he emerges from it. In both cases, we have drawn an arbitrary line and declared that everything on one side of it is a matter of personal choice, while everything on the other is a matter of profound moral consequence. We appear quite indifferent to the degradation to which two people might willingly subject themselves, yet the moment one withdraws consent, we are suddenly capable of recognising that the human body is not merely an object to be used. But surely its dignity existed before the refusal, just as the child's humanity existed before his birth?

The Russell Brand case brings this contradiction into particularly sharp focus. Why is the absence of consent the only aspect of such encounters which provokes moral scrutiny? Why are we not equally troubled by the degradation of intimacy itself?

There was a time when Catholics understood that what people watched, read and listened to mattered, because these things helped form their imaginations and their consciences.

In the early 1930s, American Catholics became increasingly alarmed by the sexual content and moral attitudes being promoted in Hollywood films. The American bishops responded by establishing what became known as the Catholic Legion of Decency, formally organised in 1934 and later known as the National Legion of Decency. Its purpose was straightforward: to oppose films which promoted obscenity, sexual immorality and the corruption of public morals.

Millions of American Catholics pledged to avoid films which offended Christian morality. The Legion developed a classification system, rating films according to their moral suitability. Films judged acceptable received an A classification, those considered objectionable in part received a B, while films classified C were condemned. A condemned rating could have serious commercial consequences for the studios, not least because Catholics represented an enormous proportion of the cinema-going public. At its height, the Legion claimed the support of more than eleven million Americans, and Hollywood took notice.

The Legion’s pressure helped bring about the rigorous enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code, commonly known as the Hays Code, which had been adopted in 1930 but initially enforced rather loosely. Under the leadership of the Catholic Joseph Breen, the Production Code Administration began exercising much stricter control over what could be shown on screen. Scripts were altered, dialogue rewritten, costumes changed and scenes removed. Adultery could not be presented as something desirable or admirable. Sexual relations outside marriage were not to be treated as casually as they are today. Filmmakers were expected to exercise restraint, not merely in what they showed, but in the moral impressions their stories conveyed.

The beginning of the end came with Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film The Pawnbroker, a Holocaust drama which included scenes of female nudity during a flashback to a Nazi concentration camp. The film’s serious subject matter provided the perfect opportunity to challenge the moral restrictions which had governed Hollywood for decades. An exception was granted to the Production Code’s prohibition on nudity, on the grounds of artistic merit, establishing a precedent which would prove increasingly difficult to contain. If nudity could be justified in the service of a serious artistic purpose, who was to decide where that purpose began and ended? The principle had been breached, and with it the authority of those who had insisted that some things ought never to be shown.

The Church of the 30’s understood that entertainment was capable of shaping the desires, expectations and behaviour of an entire population, and it was prepared to act upon that understanding. This confidence has been lost, and we are much the poorer for it.

Having dismantled the whole, we are left trying to regulate the fragments. We teach young people about consent, contraception, boundaries, sexual health and personal choice, and fail to tell them what sex actually means, and what it is for. It is into this world that Russell Brand exploded.

We are inclined to laugh at the courtship rituals of our grandparents. The chaperones, the dances, the young man arriving at the front door in a jacket and tie, the nervous introduction to the girl’s father, the expectation that a man should declare his intentions. How quaint it all seems.

But perhaps we should ask ourselves who has the greater claim to wisdom. The generation which believed that a man ought to marry a young woman before being granted the privilege of intimacy with her, or the generation which thinks it perfectly acceptable to have sex with a stranger? The generation which regarded chastity as a virtue, or the generation which regards virginity as an embarrassment?

We have not become more sophisticated about sex. We have become less capable of understanding its significance.

The Catholic Legion of Decency understood that a civilisation does not lose its moral bearings overnight. It loses them through a thousand small concessions, through what it permits, what it celebrates, what it laughs at and what it eventually ceases to notice. Its members believed that the moral imagination of a people was worth defending, and that the stories told on the cinema screen could either strengthen or undermine the virtues upon which family life depended.

We may no longer have a Legion of Decency. But perhaps we need to recover something of its conviction, beginning in our own homes, with what we watch, what we laugh at, what we allow our children to absorb, and what we are prepared to call good or bad.

A society which has reduced the morality of sexual intimacy to the single question of consent has not discovered a higher understanding of human dignity, it has forgotten what man is for.

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After 28 years walking around the world, Karl Bushby has returned to a hero’s welcome. I have to say this left me scratching my head. I understand that he has displayed extraordinary endurance, but why is no one distressed about the responsibilities he left behind?

“Where have you been?”

Those were the first words Angela Bushby spoke to her son Karl when he finally arrived at her home in Hull on Monday, having spent 28 years walking some 31,000 miles around the world. It was an affectionate joke, uttered through tears at the culmination of an extraordinary adventure, but I cannot help wondering whether there was a hint of hidden steel in her question. Did Mrs Bushby inadvertently ask the most important question of the entire expedition?

Where, indeed, had he been?

While Karl Bushby was crossing continents, surviving deserts, negotiating frozen seas and battling the bureaucracy of international borders, his eight-year-old son was growing up without him. That boy is now a 36-year-old father himself, whose 12-year-old daughter had never met her grandfather in person until this week.

Meanwhile, Britain is celebrating Bushby as a hero. Hundreds gathered to welcome him home, civic dignitaries congratulated him, and even the Prime Minister sent a message praising his courage, resilience and determination. His expedition, we are told, demonstrates what can be accomplished through extraordinary determination and self-belief.

I have to say, this has left me scratching my head. I understand that Bushby has displayed remarkable physical endurance, but why does nobody seem particularly troubled by the responsibilities he left behind? Surely we must distinguish between the capacity to accomplish something extraordinary and the wisdom of choosing to accomplish it in the first place?

Bushby was 29 when he set off in 1998. He had already divorced the mother of his young son, Adam, but divorce does not dissolve the responsibilities of fatherhood. Instead, he embarked upon an expedition governed by two rules of his own making: he would not use transport to advance his journey, and he would not return home until he had completed it. These were not obligations imposed upon him by his country, his employer or some urgent humanitarian necessity. They were rules he chose for himself in pursuit of a personal ambition. The intended journey was considerably shorter, but 28 years passed before Bushby finally returned to Hull.

In a remarkably candid interview with the Yorkshire Post, Adam described the extraordinary circumstances of his upbringing. He expressed genuine pride in his father’s accomplishments but acknowledged that there were moments in his childhood when he simply needed his dad. Bushby missed his son’s education, birthdays, Christmases, celebrations and countless ordinary milestones. Father and son remained in contact through letters, telephone calls and eventually video calls, and Adam travelled to see him on a handful of occasions. But how can these fleeting encounters replace the daily presence of a father during the formative years of a child’s life?

I find that trade-off profoundly sad for both of them. My own experience as a father, and now recently a grandfather, is immeasurably more important to me than any holiday, excursion or adventure I could conceive of. I cannot comprehend trading fatherhood for anything else, let alone a solitary journey around the world. How does a child make sense of knowing that his father has chosen to spend his life pursuing an extraordinary personal ambition rather than being there to watch him grow up?

We should not presume to know the full extent of Adam’s feelings. He has spoken generously of his father and clearly loves him. But his generosity should not prevent us from examining the moral choices that made such an unusual childhood necessary, particularly when Bushby himself appears perfectly conscious of the selfishness involved.

In an October interview with The Guardian, he acknowledged that his life over the previous 28 years had been entirely centred upon himself, with the expedition taking precedence over his personal relationships. Perhaps most astonishingly, he admitted that he did not return home when Adam was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident. He also said that he had accepted from the outset that he would not return for either parent’s funeral should they die during his expedition.

Consider that for a moment. Here is a man being widely celebrated for his extraordinary determination who apparently considered completing a self-imposed challenge more important than returning to his family during moments when they might desperately have needed him.

His explanation is equally revealing. Speaking after his arrival in Hull, Bushby suggested that completing the expedition might make him of greater value to his son than returning home. What a bizarre perspective. I genuinely struggle to understand how that argument can be sustained.

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There is something peculiarly revealing about the spectacle of a Catholic bishop finding himself obliged to defend the proposition that the Catholic Church exists, among other things, to bring people to Jesus Christ. One might have supposed that this was among the less controversial assertions available to a successor of the Apostles. Apparently not.

Bishop Robert Barron’s recent criticism of Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco, Archbishop of Algiers, has produced precisely this curious state of affairs. Cardinal Vesco’s remarks about fraternity, dialogue and conversion have prompted a controversy in which the objection to his apparent reluctance to seek conversions has itself been treated as the more serious ecclesiastical offence. The Great Commission, it seems, now requires a rather elaborate pastoral disclaimer.

Nor is the controversy confined to Algeria. Cardinal George Jacob Koovakad, Prefect of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, has recently visited England in connection with the fortieth anniversary of the interreligious gathering convened by John Paul II at Assisi in October 1986. His reflections upon the enduring significance of that event, and particularly upon its relationship to the Church’s Magisterium, raise questions which extend considerably beyond the propriety of interreligious dialogue.

At issue is not whether Catholics should respect those who profess other religions, nor whether the Church should cooperate with them in pursuit of peace and the common good. Both propositions are entirely consistent with Catholic doctrine—suggestions to the contrary are either utterly ill-informed or wilfully contrarian. The question rather is whether, in the decades since the Second Vatican Council, a carefully formulated teaching about the freedom of religious belief has been progressively transformed into an ecclesiastical reluctance to propose the truth of the Catholic faith at all.

There is an additional difficulty. The increasing tendency to describe favoured ecclesiastical initiatives as magisterial, without identifying either their precise doctrinal content or the authority with which that content is proposed, has made the faithful’s obligation of assent unnecessarily difficult to discern. Ward’s dictum “I should like a new Papal Bull every morning with my Times at breakfast” has, it seems, come true at last. The newest Doctor of the Church must weep. A vocabulary originally intended to distinguish different degrees of ecclesiastical teaching has become, in some quarters, a means of avoiding the distinctions altogether. This is not merely a theological inconvenience. It is a serious problem of ecclesial credibility.

I. The remarkable achievement of Dignitatis humanae

The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis humanae, promulgated on 7 December 1965, deserves rather better treatment than it has generally received from either its most enthusiastic admirers or its most determined critics.

Its conciliar history was unusually contentious. In the penultimate vote on the complete text, on 19 November 1965, 249 Fathers voted non placet, against 1,954 placet. At promulgation the numbers had become 2,308 in favour and 70 against, with eight invalid votes. The final number of negative votes was the highest recorded for any document promulgated by the Council. Earlier stages of the drafting had generated substantial numbers of placet iuxta modum votes, and thousands of proposed amendments required consideration.

The difficulty was not lost upon the Council Fathers themselves. Bishop Émile-Joseph De Smedt of Bruges, the official relator of the Declaration, was obliged in his final explanation of the revised text on 19 November 1965 to negotiate what might almost be described as a contradiction in terms: the assertion of an objective and universal obligation to embrace religious truth alongside the recognition of a civil right to religious freedom possessed even by those whose religious convictions are objectively mistaken.

The distinction is logically defensible, but it is by no means self-explanatory. The Council was asserting that the human person possesses no moral right to reject religious truth as such, while nevertheless enjoying a genuine juridical right not to be coerced in religious matters, even when failing to fulfil the obligation to seek and embrace that truth. The right attaches to the dignity of the person, not to the truth of the religious proposition professed. But its exercise is itself subject to the requirements of just public order. This is the same legerdemain used to square the circle of the biblical prescription of the death penalty, and 2000 years of consistent magisterial action, consent and teaching in its favour with the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s, as amended, description of it inadmissibility on the grounds of the human dignity of the convict.

De Smedt’s explanation of the latter qualification introduces a further complication. In his oral remarks, he observed that the common good was relative to the cultural development of peoples and must be judged in relation to that development (he cannot, surely, have subscribed to some kind of doctrine of the inferiority of what appear to be relatively undeveloped cultures and races?). Yet the written relatio had treated the common good in its full extent as the norm for safeguarding and promoting religious liberty. The relationship between these formulations, and between the common good and the Declaration’s narrower language of just public order, has remained a matter of theological dispute.

There is, therefore, an important difference between asserting that the Council successfully distinguished moral obligation from juridical immunity and pretending that the resulting synthesis was so obvious that no reasonable Catholic could have found it difficult. The Council Fathers themselves plainly did not regard the matter as obvious. Had they done so, they might have saved themselves several years of controversy, repeated redrafting, and the remarkable number of qualified and negative votes which accompanied the Declaration’s passage, let alone the major pretext for suppurating wound to the body of the Church of the Lebvrist soi-disant, on/off, is it/isn’t it schism.

The achievement of Dignitatis humanae was precisely that it sought to hold together propositions which could easily be mistaken for mutually exclusive claims. Its reception required the same intellectual discipline that had informed its formulation. Instead, much post-conciliar rhetoric, devoid of the necessary subtlety, has simply discarded one side of the distinction. The freedom of the person has been retained; the objective obligation to embrace religious truth has been progressively obscured. The right not to be coerced has become, in practice, something approaching a right not to be persuaded. The Church’s obligation to propose the Gospel has been transformed into an obligation to ensure that the proposal causes no religious discomfort. One can scarcely imagine a more comprehensive misunderstanding of a declaration which expressly affirmed that religious freedom provides the conditions under which human beings may be invited to embrace the Christian faith. The paradox which De Smedt laboured to explain has not been resolved. It has merely been concealed by eliminating the proposition which made it difficult. That is not reception. It is selective amnesia.

These facts are worth recalling, not because they diminish the authority of the Declaration, but because they demonstrate the care with which the Council sought to formulate its teaching. The Fathers were addressing a genuine theological difficulty: how to articulate the Church’s perennial conviction concerning the objective claims of religious truth while recognising the dignity and freedom of the human person in the religious act. The result was a distinction of theological precision. Whether or not it was pastorally prudent may reasonably be judged according to the Gamaliel principle. Does the tree flourish or does it wither? YMMV, as my kids frequently type.

The Council did not declare that religious truth was a matter of personal preference. It did not suggest that the religions of the world were interchangeable expressions of a single spiritual reality. It did not rescind the Church’s obligation to proclaim the Gospel, nor did it abolish the obligation of every human person to seek religious truth and adhere to it once known. Indeed, the opening paragraph expressly preserves the traditional Catholic teaching concerning the moral duty of individuals and societies towards the true religion and the one Church of Christ. What the Declaration established was that the obligation to seek and embrace religious truth does not confer upon civil authorities, or upon other human agents, a right to coerce religious belief.

This is a distinction between the objective obligation of conscience and the juridical immunity from coercion necessary for its proper exercise. It is not a distinction between the possession of truth and the obligation to communicate it.

The Council’s teaching is therefore entirely compatible with the proposition that the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of the means of salvation, that Jesus Christ is the unique and universal Saviour, and that the Church has an obligation to invite all people to enter into communion with him. Indeed, without those propositions, much of the theological architecture of Dignitatis humanae becomes difficult to understand, let alone explain or defend.

Yet the Declaration has frequently been received as though it taught something quite different: that religious liberty requires Catholics to refrain from seeking the conversion of others; that to propose the Catholic faith as objectively true is to compromise the dignity of those who do not profess it; and that the highest expression of religious respect is to leave another person’s convictions substantially undisturbed. This is not the teaching of the Council. It is a caricature of that teaching, and a remarkably impoverished one, at that (I was going to write “laughable,“ were it not for the fact that it actually makes me want to weep).

There is a considerable difference between recognising that a Muslim must be free to profess Islam and suggesting that a Catholic must not wish him to become a Christian. The former is an implication of religious liberty. The latter is a repudiation of the missionary mandate. It is also one that neatly sidesteps the question of the responsibility of Christian rulers to promote both the common good of their people (i.e. salvation) and defend the truth.

The irony is that a declaration intended to protect the freedom of the act of faith has increasingly been invoked to discourage the invitation to make that act at all, whilst creating a de facto prohibition against acting or speaking in a manner that might create the conditions under which such a seemingly unnecessary act might even be contemplated.

One might reasonably ask whether Dignitatis humanae has, in any meaningful theological sense, been received.

II. Sixty years of missionary immobility

The question of reception acquires a particular urgency when considered alongside the demographic history of Catholicism since the Council.

The absolute growth of the Catholic population has been considerable. From approximately half a billion Catholics in the middle of the 1960s, the Church has grown to more than 1.4 billion today. The expansion of Catholicism in Africa has been especially striking, and it would be both historically inaccurate and ecclesiastically ungrateful to overlook it.

Nevertheless, the relevant comparison is not with the past but with the present, that is with the growth of the world’s population. In the mid-1960s, Catholics constituted approximately 17–18 per cent of humanity. Six decades later, the proportion remains in much the same range. Recent Vatican statistics place the Catholic share at approximately 17.8 per cent. Thus, despite an enormous expansion in the world’s population, and despite the Church’s extensive missionary institutions, and not overlooking a “Decade of Evangelisation” and an entire pontificate self-confessedly dedicated to making every Catholic a “missionary disciple,” the proportion of humanity professing the Catholic faith has remained remarkably stable.

This does not establish that Dignitatis humanae caused missionary stagnation. Such an argument would be statistically naïve and theologically irresponsible. Fertility, migration, secularisation, patterns of baptism, religious disaffiliation and the changing geographical distribution of Christianity all complicate the picture; collapse in Europe and the rest of the Global North; stasis in Latin America and Asia; enormous expansion in Africa.

Nor is the success of evangelisation reducible to numbers. The Church is not a multinational corporation, and the number of baptisms is not simply the ecclesiastical equivalent of quarterly sales. It would, however, be equally foolish to pretend that numbers are irrelevant. The Church is commanded to make disciples of all nations, and the entry of men and women into sacramental communion with Christ is not an accidental by-product of her mission. If, then, the Church’s proportionate presence among humanity has scarcely changed over sixty years, it is at least reasonable to inquire whether something has gone wrong with the way her missionary vocation has been understood and exercised.

One possible answer is that the Council’s teaching on religious liberty has been subjected to a sustained process of simplification, until the distinction between coercion and persuasion has become the distinction between unacceptable proselytising and acceptable conversation. The result is a Church which continues to speak incessantly about evangelisation while sometimes appearing embarrassed by its intended consequence. This is a rather curious missionary achievement: to have spent sixty years discussing the importance of proclaiming the Gospel while making remarkably little proportional progress in bringing the world to profess it.

III. The Magisterium and the miraculous elevation of Assisi

It is in this context that Cardinal Koovakad’s recent reflections upon the 1986 Assisi gathering become particularly interesting.

The gathering convened by John Paul II on 27 October 1986 was undoubtedly an event of considerable symbolic importance. It expressed the Pope’s determination to enlist religious communities in the pursuit of peace and to demonstrate that religious conviction need not be a source of violence. It was not, however, an ecumenical council, a doctrinal definition or a solemn exercise of papal infallibility.

Cardinal Kookvakad has reportedly spoken of the event as having entered the Church’s ordinary Magisterium through its subsequent reception in papal teaching. The formulation requires careful examination. To say that Assisi has been incorporated into the Church’s ordinary teaching is not necessarily to say that it forms part of her infallible teaching. Nevertheless, unless the distinction is expressly maintained, the language invites precisely the confusion which Catholic theology has historically taken considerable trouble to avoid.

There is also the rather elementary question of what, exactly, is supposed to have entered the Magisterium. Is it the fact that the gathering occurred? The decision to convene it? The programme and agenda? The arrangements made for the participants’ respective religious observances? The account subsequently published in L’Osservatore Romano? The Pope’s addresses? The theological assumptions which informed the occasion? Or perhaps the menu at the lunch buffet?

The last suggestion is deliberately absurd. Unfortunately, it is only slightly more absurd than the suggestion that an historical event, considered without further specification, can itself constitute a doctrinal teaching. Even allowing for the different way in which theology is sometimes undertaken in the eastern Catholic churches, that such a suggestion should fall from the lips of a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, and the one specifically entrusted with questions of interreligious dialogue, is scarcely explicable.

An event may embody a principle. It may illustrate a doctrine. It may become an important point of reference in the development of ecclesiastical practice or it may give a counter witness to such things, but an event is not itself a doctrinal proposition. It is propositions, not occasions, which are the proper objects of magisterial teaching. The difficulty becomes especially apparent when the language of infallibility enters the discussion, or even when it attaches itself, invited or not, explicitly or implicitly, to the word “Magisterium.”

The First Vatican Council’s Pastor aeternus defined the conditions under which the Roman Pontiff teaches infallibly: when, exercising his office as supreme pastor and teacher of all Christians, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church. The Second Vatican Council’s Lumen gentium, in paragraph 25, reaffirmed that teaching and explained the infallibility of the episcopal college, including the ordinary and universal Magisterium. Neither Council suggested that the infallibility of the Church extended automatically to papal initiatives, public ceremonies, interreligious gatherings or the retrospective celebration of events which subsequent ecclesiastical authorities consider especially significant.

If Assisi is said to belong to the ordinary Magisterium, therefore, the question is not simply whether a Pope has spoken favourably of it. The question is what identifiable doctrine has been taught, by what authority, with what degree of definitiveness, and consequently requiring what response from the faithful.

This is not a pedantic exercise in ecclesiastical classification. It is the necessary condition for understanding what the Church requires Catholics to believe. In fact, it is more than this, it is a question of revealed truth and the objective claim that makes upon all people, Catholic or not, and upon which the eternal salvation depends.

IV. Infallible, definitive and authentic: distinctions which actually matter

Catholic theology distinguishes between several forms and degrees of magisterial teaching. The distinction is neither optional nor merely academic.

First, there are doctrines proposed as divinely revealed, to be believed with divine and Catholic faith. Such teachings may be proposed by solemn definition or by the ordinary and universal Magisterium. Their denial, when obstinate and undertaken with the relevant conditions satisfied, constitutes heresy.

Secondly, there are doctrines definitively proposed as necessary for faithfully preserving and expounding the deposit of faith, even where they are not themselves proposed as formally revealed. These require firm and definitive assent. They too are taught infallibly, although the theological character of the required assent differs from that owed to truths proposed as divinely revealed.

Third, there are teachings of the authentic Magisterium which are not proposed definitively. These require what Lumen gentium 25 and canon 752 describe as religious submission of intellect and will.

The distinction between these categories was carefully articulated in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1998 Doctrinal Commentary on the concluding formula of the Professio fidei. It follows, therefore, that the authentic Magisterium is not synonymous with the infallible Magisterium. Nor does the fact that a teaching is not infallible mean that Catholics are free simply to disregard it. Religious submission is a genuine ecclesial obligation. It requires a serious disposition of receptivity, respect and an honest effort to understand the teaching in continuity with the Church’s doctrinal inheritance. But neither does it require the faithful to treat every prudential judgement, pastoral preference, disciplinary decision or rhetorical formulation as though it were irreformable. Indeed, the obligation of religious submission presupposes that one can identify the teaching to which submission is owed. One cannot assent to an undefined proposition.

This point seems almost embarrassingly obvious. Yet it is increasingly neglected.

If Cardinal Koovakad means that the Church’s commitment to interreligious cooperation and the pursuit of peace forms part of her authentic teaching, there is no particular difficulty. If he means that successive Popes have encouraged the approach exemplified by Assisi, that too is readily intelligible. But if the suggestion is that Assisi as an historical occurrence has acquired some special doctrinal authority, it becomes necessary to identify the proposition which has acquired that authority. And if the claim extends to infallibility, the conditions of Pastor aeternus and Lumen gentium must be demonstrated, not merely presumed. Otherwise, we are left with the extraordinary prospect of a Church which has spent centuries carefully defining the conditions of infallibility, only to discover that those conditions can be satisfied retrospectively by the favourable commemoration of a papal gathering. Furthermore, the suggestion that questioning the prudential wisdom of the event itself constitutes an act revealing a schismatic mindset is, ironically, amounts to a form of religious coercion that we might call “gaslighting.“

One suspects that neither Pius IX nor Paul VI would have found this an especially persuasive account of the Church’s teaching office.

V. The obligation of assent in an age of magisterial inflation

The problem is compounded by the changing literary character of ecclesiastical documents. Earlier doctrinal pronouncements frequently employed a comparatively formal and juridically precise style. They identified propositions, distinguished categories, defined terms and indicated the authority with which a judgement was being made. Contemporary papal and curial documents have increasingly adopted a more expansive, conversational and occasionally polemical style. They combine doctrinal teaching with pastoral exhortation, prudential judgements, social commentary, historical interpretation and, sometimes, remarkably sharp assessments of those who disagree with their authors.

There is no theological requirement that every ecclesiastical document should resemble a scholastic disputation. The Church must communicate in ways appropriate to different audiences and circumstances. Nevertheless, the distinction between doctrinal authority and literary style cannot simply be ignored. A proposition does not become more authoritative because it is expressed more vehemently or expansively. Nor does an unusually fierce denunciation of those who disagree establish that the judgement being defended belongs to the infallible Magisterium. Indeed, some recent ecclesiastical documents have displayed an unfortunate tendency to combine doctrinal imprecision with rhetorical ferocity. The result is an ecclesiastical atmosphere in which the degree of authority attached to a statement can appear inversely proportional to the clarity with which its doctrinal content is identified.

The faithful are consequently presented with a peculiar difficulty. They are rightly instructed to receive the authentic Magisterium with religious submission, but they are not always told which propositions within a lengthy document constitute authentic doctrinal teaching, which are applications of that teaching, which are prudential assessments, and which are simply the personal judgements of the author.

This is not a satisfactory way to exercise the Church’s teaching office, nor is it just.

The problem became especially apparent during the pontificate of Francis. Documents such as Amoris laetitia, Fiducia supplicans and Traditionis custodes generated controversies not merely because their contents were disputed, but because their precise doctrinal or disciplinary status, their relationship to previous teaching, and the obligations they imposed were not always expressed with the clarity their subjects required.

These documents are not interchangeable nor is their status. Amoris laetitia is a post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Fiducia supplicans a declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith approved by the Pope, and Traditionis custodes a legislative act. Their authority, subject matter and implications differ accordingly. To confuse them would be to reproduce the very imprecision under criticism. Yet the controversies surrounding them demonstrate the practical importance of distinguishing between doctrine, discipline, pastoral application and prudential judgement.

The ferocity with which some interpretations have been defended has not always been matched by an equivalent precision in explaining what Catholics are actually obliged to accept. One might have hoped that a pontificate so devoted to dialogue would have displayed a rather greater enthusiasm for it when the interlocutors were Catholics asking serious theological questions instead of always calling into question the bona fides of those asking the questions. The issue is not whether the faithful may reject the Magisterium whenever they find its teaching inconvenient. They may not. The issue is whether ecclesiastical authority fulfils its own responsibility when it demands submission without adequately specifying the object, nature and degree of that submission.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s instruction Donum veritatis recognised that difficulties may arise in relation to non-definitive teachings. It did not equate every such difficulty with dissent, nor did it abolish the theologian’s obligation to pursue truth responsibly within the communion of the Church. It is therefore perfectly possible to maintain a serious commitment to the Magisterium while asking whether a particular formulation adequately expresses the Church’s settled doctrine or manifesting to one’s legitimate pastors concerns about the prudential wisdom of this or that act or failure to do so. Indeed, in some circumstances such questioning may be an expression of fidelity rather than its opposite.

Magisterial authority is not strengthened by exaggerating its scope. It is weakened when Catholics are encouraged to suppose that every ecclesiastical statement carries the same obligation of assent.

The resulting confusion is strikingly similar to that surrounding Dignitatis humanae: a carefully differentiated theological teaching is replaced by a simplified formula, and the simplification is then defended as though it were the doctrine itself.

VI. Attraction, persuasion and the curious disappearance of conversion

Mark Lambert’s recent Substack essay, When Did Conversion Become a Dirty Word?, identifies a closely related difficulty in the Church’s understanding of evangelisation. Lambert is right to distinguish between Benedict XVI’s teaching concerning evangelisation through attraction and the subsequent use of that language in ways which have sometimes obscured the legitimate place of persuasion.

At Aparecida in 2007, Benedict XVI explained that the Church grows through attraction. But attraction was not proposed as an alternative to missionary proclamation. It described the power of Christ’s love, manifested supremely in the Cross, which draws human beings towards him. It’s scriptural model is set out in 1 Peter 3:15, “...being ready always to satisfy everyone that asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you.” This injunction presupposes living in a way that manifests that hope (attraction), openness to being asked about it (dialogue), and being able to offer that explanation (proclamation).

The same year, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued its Doctrinal Note on Some Aspects of Evangelization, approved by Benedict XVI. The document expressly rejected the suggestion that respect for religious liberty renders attempts to persuade another person to embrace the Christian faith illegitimate. It affirmed the freedom of the act of faith while insisting upon the Church’s obligation to proclaim the Gospel.

This is entirely coherent.

The fact that conversion is the work of grace does not imply that human persuasion is irrelevant. Grace does not render argument, explanation, invitation or witness unnecessary. It enables them to become instruments of divine action. The Apostle Paul did not consider the work of the Holy Spirit incompatible with reasoned argument. Indeed, the Acts of the Apostles repeatedly describes him reasoning, explaining and persuading.

The difficulty with some of Pope Francis’s recurrent warnings against proselytism was not that they explicitly repudiated this teaching. As Lambert properly acknowledges, Evangelii gaudium contains substantial affirmations of evangelisation, including the legitimate place of apologetics and explicit proclamation. The problem was that Francis’s public rhetoric did not always preserve the distinction between improper methods of seeking conversion and the legitimate desire that another person should freely embrace the Christian faith.

The expression that the Church grows through attraction rather than proselytism can be perfectly orthodox, provided that proselytism is understood to mean coercive, manipulative or otherwise improper attempts to secure religious adherence. It should also be remembered that this connotation being attached to the word proselytism is a modern phenomenon. The noun προσήλυτος literally means ‘one who has come over’ or ‘one who has approached’. It derives from the verb προσέρχομαι (proserchomai), ‘to approach’ or ‘to come towards’. For example, Matthew 23:15 records Christ’s criticism of the scribes and Pharisees, “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you go round about the sea and the land to make one proselyte...”

The Greek reads: ποιῆσαι ἕνα προσήλυτον, that is, ‘to make one proselyte.’ neither the original Greek nor the Vulgate Latin word for a proselyte necessarily implies coercion, manipulation or improper inducement. This matters for contemporary Catholic discussions distinguishing evangelisation from proselytism. The modern pejorative meaning of proselytism cannot simply be read back into Matthew 23:15. Indeed, Christ’s criticism in that passage concerns the conduct and spiritual influence of the Pharisees, rather than establishing that seeking converts is inherently objectionable. Consequently, any theological argument that treats proselytism as intrinsically opposed to evangelisation needs to establish that distinction on theological and moral grounds.

But when proselytism is left undefined, and when warnings against it are repeatedly juxtaposed with expressions of suspicion towards persuasion, the result is predictable and the distinction, far from being made, is entirely undermined. Catholics begin to suspect that seeking another person’s conversion is itself somehow improper, with predictable consequences.

This is not a necessary consequence of Francis’s formal teaching. It is, however, an understandable consequence of rhetoric which repeatedly required theological qualification in order to avoid precisely that interpretation. Nor is the problem resolved by insisting that the Pope must have intended something orthodox. One may readily grant that possibility without being accused of being a Pollyanna, and to reflexively conclude that the opposite is true is a deeply un-Catholic, one might even say anti-Catholic, predisposition. The question is whether his words communicated that intention with sufficient clarity and to pose it is not to reveal a schematic mindset, pace Cardinal Kookvakad, but a real and sincere concern for the Great Commission.

An important distinction which must constantly be reconstructed by sympathetic interpreters has not been especially well communicated and when the distinction concerns the Church’s fundamental missionary vocation, the consequences are hardly trivial.

VII. Cardinal Vesco, Bishop Barron and the theological limits of fraternity

The controversy surrounding Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco provides a particularly illuminating example of these vexed issues.

Vesco’s position deserves to be considered within the circumstances of his adopted Algeria, where the Catholic Church constitutes a very small minority and where imprudent public interventions may expose Christians, converts and those contemplating conversion to genuine danger. The witness of the Trappist monks of Tibhirine, murdered in 1996, and that of Bishop Pierre Claverie, killed in the same year, demonstrates the profound Christian significance of solidarity, friendship and fidelity within a predominantly Muslim society. No serious Catholic should treat the vulnerability of Algerian Christians as an incidental consideration. Nevertheless, pastoral prudence and theological principle are not the same thing.

A bishop may properly judge that particular methods of evangelisation would be reckless in his circumstances. He may emphasise the importance of friendship, service, prayer and the patient witness of Christian lives. He may rightly insist that no relationship should be made conditional upon religious conversion. None of this requires him to abandon the hope that his Muslim neighbours might freely come to believe in Jesus Christ and seek baptism. This distinction is elementary, but apparently increasingly elusive.

The controversy was complicated by the fact that a sentence attributed to Vesco in Bishop Barron’s intervention was, according to CathoBel, a journalistic summary rather than a direct quotation. That correction matters and ought to be acknowledged. Perhaps it reveals more about the theological disposition of CathoBel, rather than of Cardinal Vesco, but either way, it does not dispose of the theological question raised by the Cardinal’s reported explanation of proselytism as poisonous because it involves considering another person’s religion false. If that is indeed the argument, the difficulty is substantial.

Christianity and Islam make incompatible claims about Jesus Christ. The former professes him to be the incarnate Son of God, crucified and risen for the salvation of the world. The latter rejects his divinity and does not accept the Christian account of his death and resurrection. Both sets of propositions cannot be true in the same sense. To recognise this is not poisonous, is not to demean Muslims, is nor to deny their sincerity nor yet to call in to question the genuine moral and spiritual goods present in their religious lives. It is simply to acknowledge that religious beliefs possess intelligible content.

The Second Vatican Council’s Nostra aetate recognised what is true and holy in other religions while explicitly reaffirming the Church’s obligation to proclaim Christ. Similarly, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Dominus Iesus, issued in 2000, reaffirmed the definitive and complete character of revelation in Jesus Christ. Neither document requires Catholics to pretend that doctrinal contradictions are merely alternative perspectives upon an undifferentiated religious truth. Indeed, genuine dialogue becomes impossible if participants are forbidden to acknowledge the convictions which distinguish them.

A Muslim must be free to explain why he believes Christianity to be mistaken. A Catholic must possess the corresponding freedom to explain why he believes Islam to be mistaken. Neither action is poisonous: on the contrary, each action is a necessary part of any honest and meaningful dialogue. If either is prohibited from doing so, what remains is not dialogue but a carefully supervised exchange of agreeable sentiments.

Bishop Barron’s insistence that the Church exists to bring people to Christ is therefore not an eccentric theological innovation. It is an entirely conventional expression of Catholic missionary doctrine. One may question the prudence of particular interventions without questioning the doctrine they defend. That distinction appears to have escaped some of his more enthusiastic critics.

VIII. The social-media tribunal of the new orthodoxy

The responses associated with Michael Sean Winters and Fr Jeremy Zipple illustrate a wider difficulty in contemporary Catholic argument. Their criticism, as represented by their social media interventions, places considerable emphasis upon the vulnerability of Algerian Christians and the dangers of imposing an abstract missionary programme upon a Church living in circumstances very different from those of the United States. There is a serious argument here, and it deserves to be taken seriously. But it is an argument about prudence, not about the theological legitimacy of conversion and it is one which proceeds with an implied (and subsequently explicit) questioning of Bishop Barron’s good name. It is the supreme irony of the thing that it is Winters and Zipple, staunch critics of the modus operandi of the current American President, who use the very methods of his that they frequently decry, to traduce a Bishop whose interactions with the President they find so objectionable. This particular extreme form of TDS (”Trump Derangement Syndrome”) might require a further definition of the verb ‘to trump’ in the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Let me be quite clear about my argument here: to invoke Algeria’s circumstances as a reason for caution is entirely reasonable, to employ those circumstances as though they invalidated the Church’s obligation to seek the conversion of souls is another matter. The latter argument would be laughable, were it not for the regrettable social-media influence of those advancing it. The comedy lies in the disproportion between the theological proposition under discussion and the indignation apparently provoked by its restatement. Bishop Barron has not proposed a revival of forced conversions, nor suggested that Christians in Algeria should recklessly endanger themselves or their neighbours. He has defended the proposition that bringing people to Jesus Christ belongs to the Church’s essential mission. Yet the contemporary ecclesiastical commentariat has developed a remarkable capacity to transform the restatement of settled Catholic doctrine into an occasion for suspicion, while treating increasingly adventurous reinterpretations of that doctrine as evidence of pastoral sophistication.

The procedure is familiar enough. A bishop articulates a traditional Catholic proposition. His critics respond not by demonstrating that the proposition is false, but by suggesting that its articulation is insensitive, divisive or insufficiently attentive to context. The argument then moves from the truth of the proposition to the alleged deficiencies of the person who has expressed it.

It is a convenient method, since the theological question can be avoided almost indefinitely, which, given the manifested theological shortcomings of the proponents of these social media witch hunts, is just as well for them. One might want call such exchanges dialogue, although the dialogue seems to become distinctly less welcome when someone introduces a proposition requiring an answer.

The problem is not that Winters or Zipple should be denied the right to criticise a bishop. On the contrary, the freedom to offer reasoned criticism is essential to serious theological discussion. The problem arises when appeals to pastoral sensitivity are made to carry doctrinal conclusions which they cannot sustain. The precarious situation of Catholics in Algeria is a compelling reason to exercise prudence, particularly in Algeria. It is not a theological demonstration that conversion has ceased to be an objective of evangelisation and the suggestion that a bishop who restates the Great Commission has thereby failed to understand Christian fraternity is an extraordinary inversion of the Church’s missionary tradition. The appropriate response is not to question the sincerity of those making such arguments. It is to insist that they answer the theological question rather than continually changing the subject, that or, for want of charity, simply to hold them up to the ridicule their commentary invites.

IX. Reception, continuity and the authority of the Council

The common thread running through these controversies is the failure to distinguish between a doctrine and the interpretation subsequently imposed upon it. Dignitatis humanae carefully distinguishes freedom from coercion from freedom from the claims of religious truth. Nostra aetate acknowledges truth and holiness in other religions without compromising the unique salvific significance of Jesus Christ. Ad gentes expressly affirms the Church’s missionary vocation and the obligation to proclaim the Gospel. Lumen gentium distinguishes the different modes of magisterial teaching and the corresponding obligations of assent.

Yet each of these distinctions has, at various times, been obscured by appeals to an alleged “spirit” of the Council which seems remarkably reluctant to submit itself to the Council’s actual texts. In his closing speech to the Council in December 1965, Pope Saint Paul VI for saw quite clearly that this might well happen and warned the Council Fathers that, if anyone were to look for the “spirit of the council,’ they should look at the texts of the conciliar documents themselves. This is why Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic of reform in continuity with the one subject Church remains indispensable. The Council must be understood as an authoritative act of the Church’s teaching office, situated within the continuous life of the Church and interpreted in accordance with the integrity of the faith she has received. Its teaching cannot legitimately be invoked to justify conclusions which contradict its own express affirmations. Nor does fidelity to the Council require Catholics to accept every subsequent theological interpretation, pastoral experiment or ecclesiastical fashion which claims to derive from it. Indeed, the reception of a council necessarily involves the Church’s continuing effort to understand, articulate and apply its teaching. Reception is not completed by institutional repetition or by the proliferation of commemorative conferences. It is accomplished when the Council’s doctrine becomes intelligible and fruitful within the Church’s life. By this standard, the reception of Dignitatis humanae remains incomplete.

The Declaration’s central achievement was to defend the freedom of the religious act without diminishing the obligation to seek and embrace truth. Yet much contemporary ecclesiastical discourse has retained the language of freedom while neglecting the language of obligation. It has retained the commitment to dialogue while becoming increasingly hesitant about proclamation. It has retained the vocabulary of evangelisation while sometimes appearing uncomfortable with conversion and it has invoked the authority of the Magisterium while becoming progressively less precise about what that authority actually requires Catholics to believe. These are not unrelated developments. They reflect a common failure to preserve distinctions upon which Catholic doctrine depends.

X. Neither hot nor cold

The warning addressed to the Church of Laodicea in the Book of the Apocalypse of St John is an uncomfortable one. The lukewarm are not condemned because they have failed to master the finer points of interreligious diplomacy. They are condemned because they have become complacent, self-satisfied and indifferent. The imagery is deliberately severe. God does not congratulate the lukewarm upon their moderation. He threatens to reject them.

There is, of course, no warrant here for religious aggression, discourtesy or the reckless endangerment of others. Christian zeal is not measured by the volume of one’s denunciations, still less by one’s capacity to provoke controversy. But neither is charity synonymous with the avoidance of disagreement. Still less to call into question the character and good faith of those with whom one disagrees, better load producing their motors and character in social media or gaslighting them in public statements.

To believe that Jesus Christ is the universal Saviour, and yet to regard the desire that others should come to know him as an embarrassment, is not a particularly coherent form of Christian charity. Nor is it an especially persuasive understanding of fraternity. The Church does not evangelise because Catholics are morally superior to those who profess other religions. She evangelises because she believes that the salvation offered in Jesus Christ is a gift intended for all humanity. That conviction is entirely compatible with respect for conscience, freedom from coercion, recognition of genuine truth and holiness outside visible Catholic communion, and cooperation with others for the common good. Indeed, it provides the theological foundation for a form of dialogue which is both genuinely charitable and intellectually honest.

What it cannot accommodate is the suggestion that respect for another person’s freedom requires indifference towards his religious convictions, or that the desire for his conversion is inherently incompatible with friendship. Still less can it find room for a conception of the Magisterium in which the authority of a proposition is established by the vehemence with which it is defended, or by the retrospective elevation of a favoured ecclesiastical occasion into something approaching a doctrinal definition. The Church’s teaching office exists to safeguard and communicate the deposit of faith. It does not exist to confer an aura of infallibility upon every ecclesiastical initiative which happens to enjoy contemporary approval. Precision is therefore not the enemy of pastoral sensitivity. It is one of its necessary conditions. The faithful are entitled to know what the Church teaches, what she proposes definitively, what she teaches authoritatively without defining, what she requires by way of discipline, and what remains a matter of prudential judgement.

They are equally entitled to expect that the Church’s ministers will distinguish between the freedom of the act of faith and the abandonment of the obligation to propose that faith. The difficulty with so much contemporary ecclesiastical rhetoric is not that it takes the Second Vatican Council too seriously. It is that it doesn’t take it seriously enough, frequently taking half-understood slogans that caricature what the Council taught more seriously than its texts.

Perhaps the fortieth anniversary of Assisi might therefore provide an occasion for something rather more useful than another celebration of the spirit of dialogue. It might encourage a renewed reading of Dignitatis humanae, Ad gentes, Nostra aetate and Lumen gentium, together with a more careful appreciation of the distinctions upon which their teaching depends. It might also encourage those who invoke the Magisterium to identify rather more precisely what they believe has been taught, by whom, and with what authority. And it might remind Catholics that the Church’s mission is not exhausted by making the world a more agreeable place in which everyone may remain exactly as he is.

The Church exists to proclaim Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, and to invite all humanity into communion with him. The invitation must be free. It must be charitable. It must respect the dignity and conscience of those to whom it is addressed. But it must still be made. Otherwise, one is left with a rather remarkable ecclesiastical enterprise: a Church which possesses the fullness of the means of salvation but is increasingly reluctant to suggest that anybody else might benefit from them.

It is difficult to imagine a more perfect formula for religious lukewarmness, and the Apocalypse is not especially encouraging about its prospects. Not hot. Not cold. Merely impeccably polite to those outside the Church she active seeks not to convert and scurrilously disrespectful of the human dignity of those within her visible Communion who dare to question this approach. Has anyone here heard whether the Church of Laodicea thrives? No? I thought not.

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Well, I certainly did not expect to find myself defending a Catholic bishop for insisting that the Church should bring people to Jesus Christ this week. Yet Bishop Robert Barron’s criticism of Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco has generated precisely that controversy. Apparently, the really embarrassing thing is not a cardinal suggesting that the Church is not there to convert, but another bishop objecting to his saying it, can you believe the times we are living in?

In case you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about, this controversy began when Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco, Archbishop of Algiers, suggested in an interview with Belgian Catholic publication CatholBel that the Church’s mission should focus on fraternity and dialogue with other religions rather than seeking conversions. The news broke on Wednesday (28th October) and I first read Niwa Limbu’s report on it in AdVaticanum. Lots of people were commenting and the argument pretty quickly divided into two ideological groups which seemed to me to be progressives suporting Cardinal Vesco and Catholics who were questioning what he said. Then, Bishop Robert Barron bravely publicly challenged his remarks, insisting that bringing people to Christ is fundamental to the Church’s mission and explicitly commanded by Jesus in the Great Commission which is pretty much Catholicism 101, am I right? But Bishop Barron’s intervention prompted the harshest of criticism, particularly from wacky extremist agitator Mike Lewis and a Jesuit priest, Fr Jeremy Zipple, who argued that the American bishop failed to appreciate the precarious position of Christians in Muslim-majority Algeria. Critics have also pointed to Barron’s 2011 praise for the Trappist monks murdered in Algeria, suggesting an inconsistency in his position. However, the controversy goes deeper than pastoral sensitivity: Vesco had already argued in 2022 that Christians should move away from the idea that they must evangelise and bring others to embrace their faith, raising serious questions about the distinction between prudent Christian witness and abandoning conversion as an objective of evangelisation. Does Cardinal Vesco have a point? Well, I think there is a serious pastoral question here. Christians in Algeria inhabit circumstances very different from those of Catholics in Minnesota or Essex and reckless words can have serious consequences for people who have to live alongside neighbours, officials and religious authorities long after an international argument on X has moved on. We should recognise that important context, but it does not settle the theological question: does Christian fraternity include the hope that our neighbour might come to know Jesus Christ?

For me this all goes back to and exposes rather well a problem that developed under Pope Francis. Under his papacy a legitimate distinction between evangelisation and improper methods of seeking converts became entangled with language that seemed to all and sundry to make seeking conversion itself sound improper. Pope Benedict XVI supplied the famous formulation and Pope Francis repeatedly employed it, but his repetition did not always preserve its clarity, in fact quite the opposite!

Let’s begin at Aparecida in 2007 (which, if you don’t know, is the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, held from 13–31 May 2007 at the Marian shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida in Brazil), Pope Benedict opened the conference, and the then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (the future Pope Francis) chaired the committee responsible for drafting its final document. This conference is probably the key to understanding Pope Francis. In his opening address, Pope Benedict explained the Church’s growth through attraction by locating its source in Christ’s love, supremely manifested in the Cross. In the same homily he urged courageous missionary discipleship. Attraction described the power animating the mission; it did not abolish the mission’s purpose. [1] That interpretation is reinforced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 2007 note on evangelisation, which Pope Benedict approved. It rejected the idea that religious freedom makes seeking another person’s conversion illegitimate. Helping someone freely encounter Christ was a service, while coercion and dishonest persuasion were excluded. Its discussion of ecumenism also protected the freedom of a convinced non-Catholic Christian to seek full Catholic communion. [2] This is intelligible Catholic teaching, right? Faith cannot be forced, grace cannot be manufactured and neither proposition makes explanation, argument or invitation an offence against someone’s freedom.

The difficulty with Francis was not that he formally abolished that teaching. That was not the way he tended to work (although perhaps Traditiones custodes was an exception to that rule). In fact Evangelii Gaudium calls for a “creative apologetics” and describes intellectual arguments as instruments of evangelisation. Its account of personal encounter allows explicit proclamation as well as witness through actions and I cannot honestly write those passages out of his record. [3] It is possible that there was a ghostwriter who understood all this much better than Pope Francis, but whatever assistance went into its drafting, the exhortation was issued under his authority. The relevant comparison is between his published teaching and his recurring public formulations which were, I found, incredibly disturbing.

Consider his audience of 11 January 2023. Francis said evangelisation should begin with witness rather than trying to convince, then explained that communicating Christ’s beauty would convince people, before distinguishing our convincing from the Lord’s. The surrounding catechesis emphatically affirmed missionary zeal. Nevertheless, the movement between these formulations left a distinction that required explanation rather than supplying one. [4] The charitable reading is clear enough: conversion comes through God’s initiative, and the missionary must communicate Christ rather than promote himself. But why should that require making human persuasion sound like an alternative to divine action? God can work through a reasoned argument as surely as through an act of kindness. Explaining why Christianity is true need not amount to trusting our ingenuity instead of His grace and as Teresa of Ávila, famously pointed out “Christ has no body now but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours...”.

In Rabat in 2019, Francis stressed that mission was not measured by numbers and that Christians should act as leaven within society. Great, OK, there is much to welcome in that, but he also insisted that Jesus had not sent Christians to become more numerous and warned against proselytism, without explicitly affirming in the same address that inviting others freely to embrace the faith and receive baptism remained an essential part of the Church’s mission. Surely that omission is vital in this context: there is a considerable difference between rejecting numerical growth as the measure of missionary success and appearing to discourage the conversion through which the Church grows! [5] I agree that numbers cannot measure the whole fruitfulness of the Church but it does not follow that welcoming another person into her sacramental life is somehow an embarrassing ambition.

Pope Francis repeatedly spoke as though witness and persuasion, attraction and proclamation, were competing approaches to evangelisation, but this simply does not make much sense because clearly these activities belong together: a Christian can bear witness through his life, explain why the faith is true and invite another person to embrace it, all in dependence on God’s grace and with complete respect for that person’s freedom. His repeated warnings against proselytism, without consistently explaining what distinguished it from legitimate efforts to bring someone to Christ, obscured this basic point. The resulting confusion made the desire to share the faith and seek another person’s conversion sound like something Catholics ought to distrust. And he kept going back to it. It was one of his regular topics and it always left me scratching my head. What exactly was he trying to say because it just made no sense to me!

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Outside the act of sexual intercourse between a husband and wife lies a seemingly endless range of possibilities for what one might do with one’s reproductive organs. If stealing is your thing, there are billions of shops across the globe you could steal from. But whether you steal from a small corner shop in Yorkshire or a luxury jeweller’s in Knightsbridge, what marks you out as different from those who choose not to steal is that you choose to steal. And stealing is wrong. The moral character of an act does not change according to the identity, preferences or inclinations of the person performing it. Stealing remains stealing, whoever does it, wherever they do it, and however they might feel about it.

Likewise, sexual activity that takes place outside a marital relationship is wrong. All of it. Always. The world is awash with sexual sin, normalised through our mind-moulding media and now our so-called educational establishments too. Masturbation, multiple partners, anal sex, all kinds of deviancy which that über-pervert, the Marquis de Sade, would have loved… (and hated) in equal measure, given his bizarre preoccupations with domination and submission. People who experience same-sex attraction don’t have a monopoly on perversion, sin or sexual deviancy.

But blimey, you’d think they did!

Let me break it to you, gays. We don’t need to know.

Not wanting to know about your personal peccadilloes is not the same as wanting to throw you headfirst off a multi-storey car park. Stop with the dramatics.

People who experience same-sex attraction are not some subhuman species. They are human beings, bound by the same natural law that binds us all. To suggest otherwise is unbelievably rude, disrespectful and undignified. The Church does not have one moral law for heterosexuals and another for homosexuals. Nor does it have one understanding of sin for one group and an entirely different understanding for another. We are all fallen, all sinners and all in need of repentance. The world is gonna world, whether we like it or not, and it will eat itself one day. But the Church, and particularly the priests of the Church, should not be adopting the lies of this world. What’s that about?

In the early part of the twentieth century, Our Lady appeared at Fatima to three children. St Jacinta Marto relayed a warning from Our Lady that more souls go to hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason. The warning concerns impurity, lust and unchastity, sins to which the whole of fallen humanity is susceptible. Sister Lucia added that the danger of these sins lies not simply in their gravity but in how readily they are excused and left unrepented.

Which brings us to the purpose of the Church and her Priests.

What is the Church for? What are priests for? If those questions are too complicated to answer now, we can at least say with certainty what priests are not for. They are not there to lead souls to hell by diminishing sin and failing to call for repentance. The Church exists to bring souls to Christ, not to reassure them that the things which separate them from Him are of no consequence. And if repentance is necessary for salvation, then surely the last thing anyone needs is a priest who appears to redefine what it is we ought to repent of.

And that seems to be what wonderfully predictable Fr James Martin is doing. His organisation, Outreach, has published a prayer styled as a Confiteor for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, Two-Spirited and plus people (whom, we must assume, are not quite like the rest of humanity, since the rest of us already have a perfectly good Confiteor).

This prayer, published for a particular group, goes like this:

I confess to our Loving God and to you, my siblings, that I have fallen short in my prejudiced thoughts and my biased judgements in my careless words and my degrading self-talk in what I have done to cooperate with injustice and in what I have failed to do to resist it;

Through my fear, through my complacency, through my worst errors. Therefore I ask all my spiritual ancestors, queer saints, and you, the human family, to pray with me, that together we might build a better tomorrow. Amen.

Queer saints? What exactly is a queer saint? We are about to celebrate the wonderful arrray of saints in heaven. Kings and queens, beggars and scholars, mothers and fathers, priests and religious, sinners who repented and souls who struggled heroically against temptation. So many wonderfully weird saints with one thing in common….any one want to guess what it is? - I’ll give you a clue, it’s not what they chose to do with their reproductive organs. It is, instead, that they all did that Mary thing - they all relinquished their own desires and demands and said instead ‘Your will be done’, and meant it!

The fiat that changed the world. The fiat that gave us life eternal. This is what the saints have in common, not some small, reductionist, hollow, boring, selfish and utterly meaningless worldly detail, that they took a shine to someone who had the same genitalia as them.

Sanctity does not consist in membership of a particular social or sexual category, but in our response to the grace of God. Saints are saints because they became holy, not because of the labels by which the world might choose to identify them. What, then, is gained by introducing a category of sanctity defined by sexual identity? To become ‘holy’ means to become whole - to be restored to the ‘you’ God created before sin and death claimed you.

And what of the confession itself? The traditional Confiteor is an acknowledgement of our sins, of what we have done and what we have failed to do, and an appeal for the prayers of Our Lady, the angels and saints, and our brethren. This alternative prayer speaks instead of prejudice, biased judgements, degrading self-talk, injustice and the need to build a better tomorrow. It would be unrecognisable to 98% of Catholics across all nations and all times - thus rendering it…er…not Catholic!

There was a time in the USA when black people were not allowed to share restrooms, restaurants or schools with white people. My old man remembers a time when there used to be signs on the pubs over here saying ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’. Why is it that we can see what is wrong with this, yet we can’t see a problem with the same segregation at work in the hands of those who feel the need to carve out a seperate creed for people who have a strong desire to fondle the private parts of those which match their own.

Why should people who share the same human nature, the same need for redemption and the same call to holiness require a separate expression of confession on the basis of their sexual identity? What is the purpose of dividing people into categories when the Church has always taught that the call to repentance is universal?

Fr James Martin’s Outreach may intend this prayer as an expression of welcome and inclusion but the reality is it divides and excludes. There is something profoundly unkind about suggesting, even inadvertently, that one group of people needs a different account of sin, repentance and sanctity from everybody else.

The Church does not need a separate moral law for gay people, nor a separate understanding of holiness, nor a separate route to salvation. It needs to proclaim the same truth to every human being, without favour, without exception and without apology. To do otherwise is not compassion. It is to risk withholding from souls the very truth which the Church exists to proclaim.

And where, exactly, is the justice in that?

I remember sitting on the floor of the assembly hall at school during wet-weather breaks, as Miss Jubber wheeled out the school television, opened the casing doors and fumbled about with buttons she didn’t quite know how to operate, before finally pressing play on a programme called How We Used to Live. It was a British educational series which traced the daily lives, struggles and changing fortunes of fictional Yorkshire families in and around the equally fictional town of Bradley. Across its various series, it took us through different periods of British social history, from Tudor times and the Victorian era through to the twentieth century.

It was the 1980s when we watched this, and everything seemed amusingly old-fashioned compared with the times in which we then lived. We had microwaves and BMX bikes! We were modern!

But inevitably, what seemed so advanced then appears quaint and outdated now. I think I belong to the last generation to have reached adulthood entirely internet-free. As students, we relied on physical libraries to research our dissertations, and it wasn’t until 1997 that we began emailing. I was 20 then.

There was something rather wonderful about the limitations of that world, although I doubt we recognised it at the time. If you wanted to know something, you had to go and find it out. If you wanted to speak to someone, you had to telephone them or arrange to meet. And if someone wasn’t available, well, they simply weren’t available. You tried again another time. Photographs were tangible and precious. There might only be that one curled photograph of you opening your Christmas present in 1984, capturing the look on your face when you saw that you had finally recieved your own pair of Pixie boots (albeit from Stevenage indoor market). Now you have 45,000 photographs floating around a cloud that you never look at.

There is no doubt that the intention behind many of the technological advancements since that time has been to make life easier, quicker and more efficient. Machines would do things in seconds that previously took hours, thus freeing up human beings to enjoy more leisure time, unburdened by stressful, time-consuming tasks. We would be able to read more, go for walks, eat together, spend time with our children and switch off at five o’clock. Machines would speed up the mundane business of living and allow us to devote ourselves to what we do best: being human.

But that hasn’t happened. In fact, something remarkable has occurred. Instead of machines liberating humans from the tyranny of time, we seem to have surrendered ourselves to the pace of the machines. The machines are becoming more human, while the humans are becoming increasingly machine-like, expected to operate continuously, respond instantaneously and process an apparently limitless quantity of information without interruption.

I see people around me crumbling under the stress of trying to operate at a completely unnatural rate, and I don’t think this is simply a matter of individual weakness or poor time management. The extraordinary prevalence of stress and anxiety in modern Britain suggests that something much larger is going on. Mental Health UK has reported alarmingly high levels of stress and pressure among adults, with huge numbers describing periods in which they feel overwhelmed or unable to cope. It is difficult to look at the conditions under which we now live and work without wondering whether the very technologies which promised to relieve us of our burdens have instead multiplied them.

And I think there is another dimension to this problem, one which particularly affects those of us who were raised in an earlier world and are now trying to navigate this one.

British children of my generation were raised with certain values, either consciously taught or simply imbibed from the Christian waters in which we swam. Polite speech, good manners, reliability, consideration for others and punctuality were foremost among them. You turned up when you said you would, you did what you promised, you apologised when you inconvenienced someone, and you didn’t make your problems everybody else’s. These were not simply arbitrary social conventions but expressions of a particular understanding of our obligations towards one another. They helped to make life civilised, predictable and pleasant. The difficulty is that those same children now find themselves swimming in very different waters, still attempting to apply the social codes they received to circumstances which have changed almost beyond recognition. And when the old expectations become increasingly difficult to meet, the result is a peculiar kind of stress, made worse by the conviction that we are somehow failing when we cannot manage it all.

Where once you could plan ahead, complete the tasks allocated to you and switch off at the end of the working day, you are now expected to be constantly available. We can find ourselves in a strategy similar to that of (M)utually (A)ssured (D)estruction, if everyone else is doing it, you simply have to join in, or else you will be (if not melting among the cockroaches) left behind. Everyone slows down, or no one slows down seems to be where we are at right now, no wonder stress levels are through the roof!

Television has moved from three channels which closed down each night to endless channels on endless platforms offering moving images twenty-four hours a day. Through social media we are aware of what is happening in some distant corner of some distant land and are invited, if not expected, to have an immediate opinion about it. Teachers may wake up to a news event unfolding on another continent, knowing that their pupils will already have encountered it online and must abandon their carefully prepared lessons to manage the fallout. Emails arrive at all hours, telephone calls interrupt meals, WhatsApp groups demand attention, payment links expire, reminders appear, appointments are rearranged and requests accumulate faster than they can possibly be dealt with. Most people are trying to manage this avalanche before they have even had a chance to get to the meat of what they were supposed to be doing that day. The hours disappear, the carefully constructed plans collapse, and by the evening you realise that you have spent the entire day working frantically without achieving a single thing you actually set out to accomplish.

Meanwhile, the world outside our screens has hardly become easier to negotiate. There are more cars on the roads, more people in the queues, increasingly impersonal systems to navigate and a service industry which often appears to have forgotten that it exists to provide a service. The familiar social customs which once helped strangers rub along together are less universally observed, and ordinary courtesy can sometimes seem quaint, even faintly ridiculous. Yet there we are, the children of the 1970s and 80s, still killing ourselves to arrive on time, keep our promises, be polite, be courteous and accommodate everyone else’s demands, even as the circumstances necessary to make all of this possible are steadily disappearing.

Throw into the mix a culture increasingly preoccupied with personal grievances, competing rights and the language of victimhood, and you may begin to feel like the only sane person in an asylum. You are battling a virus, a traffic jam, a malfunctioning website and fourteen unanswered messages in an effort to get to work on time because that’s what you do, while Ollie is taking the afternoon off because Betty from accounts used the wrong pronoun last week. Now you have to do Ollie’s work too.

Perhaps we are all trying to fulfil obligations which have become absurd. We have retained the expectation that a conscientious person should be able to do everything properly, while creating a world in which doing everything properly is increasingly impossible.

This is where I come to the defence of lateness.

I don’t mean the habitual lateness of someone who considers their own time more valuable than everybody else’s, or the casual disregard for other people’s arrangements which is simply bad manners dressed up as spontaneity. I mean the lateness of someone who has done their best, who has made a reasonable plan, who has tried to honour their commitments, but who has discovered that the day contains only twenty-four hours and that being human imposes certain limitations which no amount of technological advancement can overcome. I mean the person who arrives ten minutes late because they stopped to help someone, or because their child needed them, or because they simply refused to drive like a lunatic in order to save five minutes. I mean the person who doesn’t reply to an email until tomorrow because they were having dinner with their family, or who misses a telephone call because they were reading a book, saying their prayers or enjoying a conversation with the person sitting opposite them.

I am all for holding on to tradition and conserving the great things from the past, but we cannot have it both ways. We cannot demand the speed, convenience and endless availability of the modern technological world while expecting ourselves to maintain the unhurried rhythms and social conventions of a world which no longer exists. We can, of course, retreat from modern life altogether, farm our own land, keep cash under the mattress, or better yet barter for the goods and services we need. There is certainly something increasingly attractive about the prospect! But for most of us, who must live and work in the world as it is, there has to be a more sensible accommodation between the demands of modern life and the limitations of human nature.

And perhaps that accommodation begins with recovering a proper understanding of what our obligations actually are. Punctuality is a virtue because it demonstrates consideration for others, not because the clock is a god to which we must sacrifice our peace of mind. Reliability is a virtue because people should be able to trust us, not because we must be available to everybody at every moment. Courtesy is a virtue because it recognises the dignity of the person before us, not because we are obliged to accommodate every unreasonable demand made upon our time. These things are good precisely because they serve human relationships, and when our pursuit of them begins to damage those relationships, or leaves us so exhausted and distracted that we have nothing left to give to the people we love, something has gone badly wrong.

There is a terrible irony in the fact that we have developed machines capable of performing in seconds tasks which once occupied entire days, and yet seem to have less time than ever for the things which make life worth living. We are in danger of becoming extraordinarily efficient at everything except being human. We can communicate instantly with someone on the other side of the world, while finding ourselves too busy to speak properly to the person sitting next to us. We can organise every minute of our lives, but seem increasingly incapable of enjoying any of them.

The Christian understanding of man has always recognised something which our technological age seems determined to forget: that we are creatures, not machines. We have bodies which tire, minds which require rest, souls which need silence, and obligations which cannot always be measured in minutes or managed through an electronic calendar. Even God, in the account of Creation, gave us a day of rest. Not because He needed one, but because we do.

So perhaps we should stop treating every delay as a personal failure, every unanswered message as a moral deficiency and every interruption to our carefully organised schedules as a catastrophe. We should continue to be considerate, to keep our word and to respect the time of others, but we should also recover the freedom to recognise that not everything is urgent, not everyone is entitled to our immediate attention, and not every demand deserves to be met, and then accept the consequneces that follow.

If the machines were supposed to give us more time to be human, then surely the least we can do is insist upon taking some of that time back. And if that means occasionally being late, then so be it. Better to arrive a little late, with our humanity intact, than to spend our lives arriving punctually at every appointment while missing the point of life altogether.

And on that note….is that the time? I gotta run.

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Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle’s election as Dean of the College of Cardinals has become one of the most intriguing developments of Pope Leo XIV’s young pontificate. What initially appeared to be a significant, but largely routine, change in the Church’s senior leadership has acquired unexpected importance following the Holy Father’s surgery for lung cancer. Now, new reporting from Rome suggests that Tagle’s elevation may tell us something important about the distribution of influence within the Vatican itself.

In an article published in Il Giornale on 18 October, Vatican correspondent Nico Spuntoni examines the controversy surrounding Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State, whose suggestion that Pope Leo might need to “recalibrate” his pontificate provoked considerable discomfort within the Curia. Parolin subsequently explained that he was referring to the possibility of adjusting the Pope’s demanding travel schedule, particularly his forthcoming apostolic journey to Latin America. Given the seriousness of Leo’s operation, this was a perfectly reasonable practical concern, although the expression itself was unfortunate. There is a considerable difference between suggesting that a Pope might need to reconsider his engagements and suggesting that his pontificate might require recalibration. But Spuntoni’s article, subsequently translated into English by Diane Montagna, suggests that the controversy goes rather deeper than one poorly chosen expression.

According to his reporting, Parolin has already experienced several disappointments under Leo XIV, including disagreements over Vatican property, the decision to send Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher on a sensitive diplomatic mission to Moscow and, most interestingly of all, the election of Cardinal Tagle as Dean of the College of Cardinals. It is this last development that deserves particularly close attention.

The cardinal who was not chosen

On the 9th October, Pope Leo approved the election of Cardinal Tagle who is 69, as the first Asian Dean of the College of Cardinals, succeeding the 92-year-old Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re. Pope Leo is 71, so the two men are of a very similar age. The election of Tagle was conducted by the cardinal bishops, in accordance with the Church’s law, and confirmed by the Pope. It is important to mention this distinction because the Dean is not simply appointed at the personal discretion of the Roman Pontiff. It also reveals that Tagle is popular with the Cardinals.

What Spuntoni now reports, however, is that Parolin had himself aspired to the position, apparently as early as 2025, and that his candidacy encountered resistance. According to an unnamed source cited by Spuntoni, the outgoing Dean, Cardinal Re, communicated a preference from higher authority that the new Dean should be under eighty years of age, which is perfectly understandable, Cardinal Re had been able to preside over the general congregations preceding the 2025 conclave, but because of his age he could not enter the Sistine Chapel as an elector. Indeed, it was Cardinal Parolin who presided over that conclave as the senior cardinal bishop eligible to vote an important detail which is worth remembering.

Parolin had already exercised one of the most solemn responsibilities associated with the leadership of the College of Cardinals. He had presided over the election which gave the Church Pope Leo XIV. At 71, he also satisfied the reported preference for a Dean under eighty. Yet Spuntoni’s source claims that when Parolin was considered, the objection was raised that he already had too many commitments. This is curious, because Cardinal Tagle himself occupies an important position within the Roman Curia as pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelisation. If the account is accurate, the explanation offered for setting Parolin aside seems, at the very least, open to question.

It is important to be careful here. Spuntoni’s account relies upon an unnamed source, and we do not know who expressed the objection to Parolin, whether it reflected the Pope’s personal wishes, or whether other considerations influenced the election.

There is, however, some relevant background. During the sede vacante following Pope Francis’ death, Parolin’s apparent position as a leading candidate for the papacy had already attracted criticism from fellow cardinals. Christopher White, writing in the National Catholic Reporter, reported that his celebration of Mass in St Peter’s Square on 27 April had left several cardinal-electors distinctly unimpressed, with some suggesting that he had effectively “failed the audition” for the papacy. There were also reports of considerable irritation among Polish prelates at his failure to mention either St John Paul II or St Faustina during that Divine Mercy Sunday celebration. These criticism do not establish that Parolin presumed he would become Pope and the manoeuvring surrounding a conclave makes it especially important to distinguish legitimate reservations from attempts to undermine a prominent candidate, but they suggest that Parolin’s position within the College of Cardinals was perhaps considerably less secure than his prominence as Secretary of State might have suggested.

Against this background, Spuntoni’s latest revelation acquires additional significance. The man who presided over the conclave which elected Leo XIV and who had himself been considered a serious candidate for the papacy, has now reportedly been passed over for the office that would ordinarily place its holder at the centre of the next papal election. That doesn’t establish a political defeat, still less a deliberate attempt by Pope Leo to marginalise him. But it raises an intriguing possibility: that the reservations about Parolin which surfaced during the last sede vacante have continued to influence his standing within the Church’s senior leadership.

Why Tagle matters

Cardinal Tagle is no obscure Vatican functionary suddenly thrust into prominence by circumstance. The former Archbishop of Manila is one of the most recognisable and prominent figures in the universal Church, and his international standing extends considerably beyond Rome. He has long been associated with the missionary and pastoral priorities of Pope Francis and has occupied a prominent role in the Church’s evangelising structures. He was also widely discussed as a possible candidate for the papacy before the 2025 conclave and was considered one of the leading contenders alongside Cardinal Parolin himself. There is also a deeply personal and symbolic dimension to Tagle’s relationship with Leo XIV. The two men had worked closely together in the Roman Curia since 2023, and during the conclave Tagle found himself sitting beside Cardinal Robert Prevost as the votes accumulated in his favour. In a moving account subsequently given to Vatican News, Tagle recalled watching Prevost alternating between smiles and deep breaths, describing his reaction as one of “holy resignation and holy fear”. Tagle silently prayed for him, recognising that something profoundly sacred was taking place. “Let holy silence envelope Jesus and Peter”, he recalled thinking as the cardinals greeted their newly elected Pope.

Just ten days later, at the inauguration of Leo’s Petrine ministry, it was Cardinal Tagle who placed the Fisherman’s Ring upon the new Pope’s finger. This is a striking sequence of events: the cardinal who sat beside Prevost as he confronted the extraordinary burden of the papacy was subsequently entrusted with a central ceremonial role in its inauguration, and has now become Dean of the College of Cardinals. None of this proves that Tagle enjoys particular political favour with Leo, but it does hint strongly in that direction and certainly gives their relationship a personal and spiritual depth which should not be overlooked. Tagle’s election as Dean now gives that prominence an additional institutional dimension.

Under the arrangements established by Pope Francis in 2019, the Dean serves a five-year term, renewable if necessary. Because Tagle is considerably younger than eighty, he would ordinarily be eligible to preside over a future conclave should the Apostolic See become vacant during his term and before he reaches the electoral age limit, but the importance of his position must not be exaggerated. Canon 352 describes the Dean as first among equals. He presides over the College of Cardinals but exercises no governing authority over his fellow cardinals. He has no automatic authority over the Roman Curia and no jurisdiction to exercise the powers of the Pope. This is a fundamental distinction, especially given the extraordinary circumstances of the past week.

On 14 October, Cardinal Tagle presided over the Mass in St Peter’s Square marking the tenth anniversary of Amoris Laetitia, while Pope Leo recovered in hospital. He read the homily prepared by the Holy Father, giving visible expression to the continuity of the Church’s public worship during the Pope’s temporary absence. The continuity was reassuring but we shouldn’t mistake it for a transfer of papal authority. Tagle was acting on the Pope’s behalf in a particular liturgical celebration, not assuming the government of the universal Church and therein lies the deeper ecclesiological significance of these developments.

Influence is not authority

As we discussed when Tagle’s election was first announced, canon law acknowledges the possibility of an entirely impeded Roman See but provides no comprehensive mechanism for determining permanent papal incapacity or transferring the Pope’s unique jurisdiction in such circumstances. That remains an unresolved difficulty, one made increasingly relevant by advances in modern medicine. It is essential, however, not to confuse a genuine canonical problem with the Holy Father’s present medical circumstances. Pope Leo has undergone successful surgery, has returned to the Vatican and, at today’s Angelus, announced that he will gradually resume his activities. His recovery is a cause of considerable gratitude and there is no justification for treating the Church as though it were preparing for an imminent vacancy of the Apostolic See, so the significance of Tagle’s election lies elsewhere. It invites us to distinguish between three forms of ecclesiastical prominence: the practical influence exercised by those who govern alongside the Pope, the institutional responsibilities of those who serve the College of Cardinals, and the unique authority entrusted to the Roman Pontiff himself, these are all related, but they are not interchangeable.

Is Leo quietly reshaping the Vatican?

Spuntoni’s reporting suggests that the relationship between Leo XIV and Parolin may subject to some friction. He points to instances in which Parolin’s preferences reportedly failed to prevail and, rather interestingly, suggests that the Secretary of State’s prominence in public discussions has become a source of irritation among some Vatican officials. It is possible that we are witnessing a gradual reduction in Parolin’s influence, but there are reasons to resist an overly dramatic interpretation.

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The Holy See has once again called upon the international community to pursue nuclear disarmament, telling the United Nations this week that the work of disarmament cannot simply be postponed until more favourable circumstances arise. Is this a reasonable intervention, particularly in a world where nuclear threats have once again become part of the language of international politics? There is, of course, a formidable argument in favour of nuclear deterrence. Since 1945, the world has managed to avoid another direct war between its principal nuclear powers, and it would be naive to deny that the prospect of mutual annihilation has played a significant part in restraining them. At the present moment we are living at a time when Russia, China and other nuclear powers are expanding or modernising their capabilities, which makes the prospect of complete disarmament seem almost fantastical.

Yet I find myself persuaded that the Holy See must continue to challenge this arrangement, precisely because the Church’s responsibility is not exhausted by the calculations of political necessity. A government has a grave obligation to protect its people against aggression and it may reasonably conclude that abandoning its nuclear deterrent while potential adversaries retain theirs would be dangerously irresponsible. The Church must take that responsibility seriously but she must also insist that a system founded upon the permanent threat of catastrophic destruction cannot be accepted as humanity’s final answer to the problem of war. The fact that nuclear deterrence may have prevented immense evil does not establish that it is morally sufficient, still less that it should become a permanent feature of international relations.

This is where the Church’s prophetic responsibility and her commitment to political realism must meet. She must call nations beyond the logic of mutually assured destruction without pretending that trust can be manufactured by declarations or that disarmament can safely proceed without verification, reciprocity and enforceable agreements. The question, therefore, is not whether the Church should advocate nuclear disarmament. I believe she must. The question is can she do it in a prophetic way that calls people to recognise why this is so important and also whether she can do so while maintaining the careful moral distinctions necessary to guide those who bear responsibility for the security of nations.

Behind the Vatican’s latest appeal lies a rather more difficult theological question, one which illustrates a problem that became increasingly apparent during the pontificate of Pope Francis and which Pope Leo XIV has now inherited. What happens when a pope appears to transform a conditional moral judgement into an absolute prohibition, without adequately explaining how that change can be reconciled with the Church’s previous teaching? The question is not whether Catholics should desire a world without nuclear weapons, that may seem impossibly optimistic, but we have faith that nothing is impossible with God, and so we must maintain that hope. The question is not whether the deliberate annihilation of civilian populations could ever be justified, Catholic moral teaching has consistently rejected such acts. The difficulty concerns nuclear deterrence itself, and the distinction between possessing a weapon, threatening its use, and actually employing it and it is a distinction that three successive pontificates have approached in markedly different ways.

John Paul II: A conditional toleration, not an endorsement

In June 1982, at the height of the Cold War, Pope St. John Paul II addressed the United Nations General Assembly on disarmament. His position was carefully qualified; he recognised the terrifying consequences of nuclear war and the moral dangers inherent in the arms race, but he also understood the responsibility of governments to protect their populations against aggression. He therefore stated:

“In current conditions ‘deterrence’ based on balance, certainly not as an end in itself but as a step on the way toward a progressive disarmament, may still be judged morally acceptable.”

Every qualification matters, John Paul II was not blessing the permanent possession of nuclear arsenals. He was acknowledging that, under particular historical circumstances, maintaining a balance of deterrence might be morally tolerable as a temporary measure directed towards genuine disarmament. He was making a distinction which is fundamental to Catholic moral theology. Something may be tolerated under difficult circumstances without becoming an ideal. Equally, a policy may become morally indefensible if the conditions which once justified its toleration cease to exist. John Paul II understood that statesmen do not make decisions in an imaginary world where every government can be trusted to act justly. They make decisions in a fallen world, where the unilateral abandonment of defensive capabilities may expose innocent populations to grave danger. His judgement was therefore both morally serious and politically realistic.

Benedict XVI: Continuity through moral clarity

Pope Benedict XVI went further, developing this argument without abandoning its underlying logic. In his 2006 World Day of Peace message, Benedict described reliance upon nuclear weapons for national security as deeply mistaken and called for progressive, concerted nuclear disarmament. He was especially concerned that the pursuit of security through military superiority could perpetuate precisely the insecurity it was supposed to overcome. But Benedict’s approach remained characteristically attentive to the distinction between enduring moral principles and their application to changing circumstances.

In 2010, he called for coordinated and secure disarmament, emphasising that peace rests upon trust, international commitments and respect for promises, rather than merely upon a balance of military power. This was a demanding moral vision, but it did not require Catholics to believe that the complicated prudential questions surrounding deterrence had somehow disappeared. Indeed, Benedict recognised that disarmament had to be achieved through genuine international cooperation, not simply through declarations of moral aspiration. The goal was clear, the means required serious political and moral reasoning.

Francis: From conditional toleration to categorical condemnation

Then came Francis, the Pope of confusion. During his visit to Hiroshima in November 2019, Francis declared that the use of nuclear weapons was immoral and added that their very possession was immoral. This was not merely a condemnation of nuclear warfare and it wasn’t simply an appeal for disarmament. It appeared to remove the distinction which John Paul II had explicitly preserved. Francis argued that the possibility of an accident, the madness of an individual leader or the catastrophic consequences of nuclear conflict made possession itself morally unacceptable. These are serious considerations, indeed, the dangers of accidental escalation, technological failure and irresponsible leadership have become increasingly difficult to dismiss. It is entirely possible to argue that circumstances have changed so profoundly since 1982 that the conditions under which John Paul II considered deterrence tolerable no longer obtain. But that argument needs to be made, not simply assumed.

Here, I think, we encounter one of the characteristic weaknesses of Francis’s pontificate. Francis frequently identified genuine moral concerns, sometimes with considerable pastoral force, but rarely provided the theological precision necessary to explain how his conclusions related to established Catholic teaching. The problem was not necessarily his moral intuition, it was the tendency to express that intuition in categorical language before the doctrinal implications had been adequately worked through. In this instance, Francis seemed to move from saying that nuclear deterrence was becoming increasingly difficult to justify to declaring that possession itself was immoral and those two propositions are not identical. The first is a prudential judgement about whether particular circumstances continue to satisfy established moral conditions. The second, depending upon how it is understood, risks becoming a universal moral prohibition. Inevitably this means that if the latter is intended, Catholics are entitled to ask how it can be reconciled with the judgement of John Paul II.

The problem is larger than nuclear weapons

This is where the issue becomes particularly troubling and it is a trend we can discern running throughout the Bergoglian Pontificate. In the course of his tenure as the successor of Peter we witnessed similar difficulties surrounding the death penalty, aspects of marriage and sacramental discipline and the relationship between pastoral accommodation and established moral norms. These controversies are not identical, and it would be a mistake to treat them as though they all involved the same degree of doctrinal authority or the same theological problem, but nevertheless, a recurring difficulty was the failure to explain with sufficient clarity whether a new pronouncement represented a development of doctrine, a revised prudential judgement, or an apparent departure from previous teaching. For Catholics who take the magisterium seriously, these distinctions matter enormously. The Church does not understand doctrinal development as a process by which yesterday’s truth becomes today’s error, authentic development deepens our understanding of what has been handed down. It may clarify principles, correct inadequate formulations and apply enduring truths to circumstances that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined, but it must preserve an intelligible relationship with what came before. St John Henry Newman’s great insight was that genuine development preserves the identity of the doctrine being developed. Growth is not the same thing as contradiction. If a pope believes that a previous moral judgement can no longer be sustained, he owes the Church a careful explanation of why. Is the principle itself being reconsidered? Were the relevant circumstances misunderstood? Has the factual situation changed? Or was the earlier judgement always contingent? Without those distinctions, the faithful are left to construct their own explanations. Some conclude that the Church has simply changed her mind. Others insist that every papal statement must somehow be reconciled, however strained the argument becomes. Still others begin to lose confidence in the reliability of the teaching office itself.

None of these outcomes serves the Church well.

Why doesn’t Pope Leo simply correct Francis?

This is perhaps the most difficult question for Catholics who have watched these developments with growing concern.

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This question emerged as one of the most important themes of our latest conversation on Regina Unscripted, when Katherine and Mark were joined by our friend Joshua Charles, Catholic convert, author and founder of Eternal Christendom.

Joshua’s journey into the Catholic Church began not with an attraction to Catholic culture or liturgy, but with a profound love of Scripture and a growing recognition that Protestantism could not satisfactorily answer some fundamental questions about Christian authority, doctrine and salvation. His encounter with the Church Fathers eventually led him into full communion with the Catholic Church in 2019, but, as he explained, conversion is not simply an event in the past. It is something that must continue throughout our lives.

We explored how becoming Catholic transformed his understanding of morality, including his former defence of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His explanation was particularly striking because it brought the discussion back to a principle that modern society finds extraordinarily difficult to accept: we may never do evil that good may come of it.

Joshua expressed this with remarkable simplicity:

“If you never want to do evil, the secret is be willing to suffer.”

That insight runs through much of our conversation, from his deeply personal testimony about the transformative power of praying the Rosary every day, to the importance of prayer, fasting and penance for those we love, particularly those who have fallen away from the Faith.

We also discussed Pope Leo XIV, the extraordinary scenes during his recent visit to France, and the responsibilities of Catholics who are concerned about developments within the Church. Joshua was refreshingly candid about the difficulties facing the Church and the legitimacy of questioning decisions made by her hierarchy. But he also challenged a tendency, increasingly evident in Catholic commentary, to become so consumed by ecclesiastical controversies that we neglect our own spiritual lives.

There is a world of difference between defending the Faith and allowing our frustrations with the hierarchy to become the defining characteristic of our Catholicism.

Perhaps the most powerful moment came towards the end, when Joshua introduced us to St Augustine’s image of the Church as a threshing floor, upon which the wheat and the chaff remain mixed until the final judgement.

Augustine was addressing a problem remarkably familiar to Catholics today: the scandal of discovering wickedness, hypocrisy and even sacrilege among those who profess the Christian Faith. His answer was neither to excuse these evils nor to abandon the Church because of them.

Rather, he warned the faithful against attempting to separate themselves from the chaff before Christ Himself comes to judge.

“Let him remain. Let him not depart from the threshing floor.”

It is an extraordinary passage, and one which speaks directly to those tempted to believe that the present crisis somehow invalidates the Church’s divine constitution or justifies withdrawing from her communion.

We must never confuse fidelity to Christ with an obligation to defend every action of those entrusted with governing His Church. But neither can we confuse righteous indignation with holiness, or imagine that the Church ceases to be Christ’s Church when she suffers through the sins of her members.

The answer, ultimately, is not to become less Catholic in response to the Church’s difficulties, but to become more deeply and authentically Catholic ourselves.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking conversation, ranging from the earliest centuries of Christianity to some of the most pressing questions facing Catholics today. Joshua brings a remarkable knowledge of the Church Fathers, but what makes his contribution particularly valuable is his insistence that their wisdom must shape not merely what we believe, but how we actually live.

I hope you enjoy watching it as much as Katherine and I enjoyed recording it.

Watch our full conversation with Joshua Charles below, and do share your thoughts in the comments.

You can also discover Joshua’s excellent work at Eternal Christendom.

Professor Jacob Phillips, Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s University, returns to Regina Unscripted for a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation with Katherine and Mark about Pope Leo XIV, Catholic tradition, the crisis of modern culture, and the extraordinary opportunities now opening up for the Church.

Beginning with the remarkable scenes surrounding Pope Leo’s recent visit to France, we reflect on the significance of tens of thousands of young Catholics gathering around the Successor of Peter, and what their evident hunger for faith reveals about the spiritual condition of contemporary Europe. For Professor Phillips, the visit offered something profoundly important: a vision of Catholicism which transcends the increasingly bitter divisions between traditionalists and progressives, reminding us that the Church’s identity is found neither in nostalgia nor fashionable accommodation, but in her living continuity with Christ.

Drawing on the thought of St John Henry Newman and Pope Benedict XVI, Jacob explores the nature of authentic doctrinal development and the temptation, present on both sides of the ecclesiastical divide, to identify some historical moment when the Church supposedly lost her way. We discuss the responsibilities of ecclesiastical authority, the difficulties created by poorly communicated Vatican documents, and the need to distinguish legitimate criticism from a loss of faith in the Church herself.

The conversation then turns to one of the most urgent moral questions facing Western society: assisted dying. Drawing on his recent work challenging the assumptions behind euthanasia, Professor Phillips makes a powerful case for understanding human life as something received rather than possessed. Even in suffering, dependency and approaching death, human existence retains a meaning which cannot be measured simply by personal autonomy or utility. Particularly striking is his experience of finding common ground with secular audiences, suggesting that the Catholic understanding of human dignity can still speak powerfully to those who do not share our faith.

We also confront the increasingly difficult questions surrounding immigration, national identity and the Church’s social teaching, asking whether the moral obligation to welcome the stranger has sometimes been presented without sufficient recognition of the corresponding responsibilities towards the common good, cultural continuity and social stability.

In the final part of our discussion, we explore Joseph Ratzinger’s theological engagement with modernity, considering whether the Church should resist contemporary intellectual developments or seek to purify and transform them in the light of revelation. This leads to a fascinating exchange about science, reason, human consciousness and the fundamental question of where meaning comes from.

Perhaps the most encouraging observation comes when Professor Phillips reflects upon the unexpected signs of renewal he is witnessing in England and Wales. Younger generations are searching for truth, beauty, authority and coherence, often precisely because the institutions of secular society have failed to provide them.

As Jacob puts it: “We are on the front foot now.”

The challenge for Catholics is whether we have the intellectual confidence, spiritual courage and fidelity to the Church to respond when people come looking for answers.

This is a conversation about far more than the controversies of the moment. It is about recovering a properly Catholic understanding of tradition, reason, grace and the Church’s mission in a world which, perhaps more than it realises, is searching for God.

Watch the full conversation with Professor Jacob Phillips here:

Pope Leo XIV’s decision to appoint Archbishop Vittorio Francesco Viola as Archpriest of St Peter’s Basilica will understandably unsettle Catholics attached to the traditional Roman liturgy. A prelate closely associated with the restrictions of the Francis pontificate now assumes responsibility for the basilica to which those Catholics make pilgrimage precisely to express their communion with Peter. His departure from Divine Worship creates an opportunity for change, but his arrival at St Peter’s offers little immediate reassurance.

The appointment, announced on 10 October, places Viola in the three offices previously held by Cardinal Mauro Gambetti: Archpriest of St Peter’s, Vicar General for Vatican City and President of the Fabric of St Peter. Bishop Aurelio García Macías, previously undersecretary of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, succeeds him as secretary. These are substantial responsibilities, and Viola’s transfer cannot plausibly be described as his disappearance into institutional obscurity.

To understand the concern, however, we need to distinguish the record from the rhetoric surrounding it. Viola’s reputation does not rest entirely on hostile descriptions in traditionalist publications. There is documentary evidence of a restrictive approach, and the most revealing example is his correspondence with Archbishop Peter Comensoli concerning the traditional Mass in Melbourne. In a letter dated 18 April 2024, signed by Viola, the dicastery permitted celebrations according to the 1962 Missal in two parish churches for a further two years, while refusing permission for St Patrick’s Cathedral. Its reasoning was significant: the cathedral should exemplify the liturgical life of the diocese, and the older liturgy was considered inappropriate there. Future requests were to include information about attendance and the steps taken to lead these congregations towards the reformed liturgy.

This was an approach in which permission for the older rite was accompanied by an expectation that its adherents should eventually move away from it. For Catholics who regard their attachment as a legitimate expression of Catholic faith, rather than a temporary difficulty requiring correction, that is deeply problematic. It also explains why Viola’s appointment to another exceptionally important basilica will provoke anxiety: his previous decisions give them concrete reasons to question whether their worship will receive a sympathetic hearing.

His reported involvement in developing restrictive policy also deserves attention. The Pillar has identified Viola as one of the principal drafters of Traditionis custodes, while its reporting this April attributed to a senior Vatican official the assessment that he had played a substantial role in drafting the document and in subsequent proposals for further restrictions. That gives the concern a basis beyond polemical characterisations, although the internal drafting process has not been publicly documented in full.

Separately, Diane Montagna reported in June 2024 that a further restrictive document had been presented to Pope Francis, with Viola centrally involved in its preparation and supervision. Her account relied on unnamed sources and must be reported as such. It supports the assessment that Viola was an influential advocate of tightening restrictions; it does not permit us to reconstruct every private conversation or establish why the proposed text was never promulgated.

Responsibility nevertheless cannot be displaced entirely onto an influential official. Pope Francis appointed Viola secretary of Divine Worship on 27 May 2021, alongside Cardinal Arthur Roche’s appointment as prefect, shortly before Traditionis custodes appeared. Viola exercised authority within a leadership structure Francis had chosen. Even if he was a principal instigator or drafter, the policy promulgated by Francis remained Francis’s policy. Equally, today’s appointment belongs to Leo: an inherited official has now been entrusted with new responsibilities by the reigning Pope.

The immediate context at St Peter’s makes that decision particularly sensitive.

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Yesterday’s feast invites us to consider a man whose intellectual greatness lay in his willingness to follow truth wherever it led, even when doing so required him to surrender the position, friendships and security he had built his life around. His reception into the Catholic Church on 9 October 1845 was the costly consequence of that commitment.

St. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s contribution remains invaluable and are especially pertinent in a contemporary context because the questions he confronted have become our questions with renewed urgency. How can the Church grow in understanding while remaining faithful to what she has received? What authority does conscience possess, and what distinguishes its demands from our preferences? How does faith become a living reality rather than a collection of propositions we profess without allowing them to govern us? These questions reach into the present controversies surrounding doctrine, pastoral practice and the confidence of ordinary Catholics.

His chosen epitaph, Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem —“Out of shadows and images into truth”—captures the direction of his life. It should be distinguished from his cardinal’s motto, Cor ad cor loquitur, “Heart speaks to heart”. Read together, they offer a beautiful account of the Christian vocation: a journey towards truth which engages the whole person and reaches others through personal love. For each of us, the challenge is whether we are prepared to undertake that journey ourselves. We can become so attached to our preferred account of the Church that we resist anything which requires us to reconsider it. Psychologically, this is recognisable: an interpretation can become bound up with our identity, our friendships and our sense of having understood what others have missed. Contrary evidence then feels threatening and we begin to defend the explanation rather than test it. Newman’s example challenges us to ask whether we are still seeking truth, or have begun protecting ourselves from what discovering it might cost. We live in a moment when it seems some expect every new initiative to vindicate their hopes of doctrinal change; others have developed a suspicion so comprehensive that every appointment, pastoral gesture or unfamiliar phrase becomes evidence of betrayal. Both habits can make the evidence serve a conclusion already reached.

Newman’s work asks for a more disciplined encounter with reality.

His account of doctrinal development addressed a formidable objection to Catholicism. If the faith was entrusted to the apostles, how could the Church legitimately teach with a precision and elaboration absent from the earliest Christian formulations? Did the passage of centuries demonstrate fidelity, or the accumulation of innovations? Newman argued that the later Catholic faith could be understood as the unfolding of what was present from the beginning, rather than its replacement.

That insight gave the Church a powerful way of understanding her history. Revelation is received by human beings who must reflect upon it, defend it against error and articulate its implications in circumstances the first Christians never encountered. A truth can be possessed before all its consequences are recognised. The need for greater precision does not mean that the original gift was defective; it reflects the depth of that gift and the work required to understand it.

The problem is that growth raises the possibility of distortion. To counter this, Newman distinguished development from corruption, proposing seven “notes” through which their difference could be examined. These concern the preservation of a doctrine’s identity and principles, its capacity to assimilate, its logical unfolding, its anticipation in earlier belief, its conservation of the past and its enduring vigour. His method requires us to examine the relationship between a proposed development and the faith from which it claims to grow.

This is why his much-quoted observation that “to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often” cannot responsibly become a slogan for whatever alteration we happen to desire. Its setting is an argument about the life and development of ideas. The existence of change does not establish its legitimacy; the question remains whether an idea is being brought to fuller expression or losing its identity. Remember Newman’s epitaph because it can be our guide here: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem. It shows us that for Newman, the Christian life was a pilgrimage towards reality itself. We live in a world of shadows and images, where our understanding is necessarily partial, our judgements imperfect and our vision obscured by the limitations of human experience. Yet beyond these shadows lies the fullness of Truth, not an abstract philosophical proposition, but a Person: Jesus Christ.

My friend the Rev Dr Stephen Morgan (one of the leading Newman scholars in the world today) makes this central distinction in his essay, “Hijacked Development”. In it he challenges appeals to Newman which, in his judgement, provide cover for reversals of moral teaching, particularly in arguments surrounding Amoris Laetitia and Fiducia Supplicans. His warning deserves serious attention: invoking Newman does not relieve anyone of the obligation to demonstrate continuity. Nor can pastoral practice be treated as though it has no bearing on what the faithful understand the Church to teach.

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For the past 4 years, you have known us as Catholic Unscripted. Now, thanks to your generous support, we have found ourselves in a position to partner with REGINA Magazine and are relaunching as REGINA Unscripted.

As you know, our aim is to draw together individuals with a vibrant faith from around the English-speaki…

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