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The decision of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, communicated by Cardinal Arthur Roche, to reject the request of the German bishops for permission to allow lay preaching during the homily at Mass has predictably provoked disappointment among advocates of reform in Germany. Among the most critical responses was that of Irme Stetter-Karp, who argued that the bishops are “answerable to the faithful” who desire such changes and suggested that Rome’s refusal would deepen frustration within the Church.

Yet the controversy reveals a deeper disagreement about the nature of the Church, episcopal authority, and the Eucharistic liturgy itself.

The Vatican’s refusal was not an arbitrary exercise of centralised authority. Rather, Cardinal Roche’s letter reaffirmed what the Church has consistently taught concerning the relationship between Holy Orders and the ministry of preaching within the Eucharistic celebration. The homily is not simply a religious address delivered during Mass; it is an integral part of the liturgy itself, intrinsically connected to the proclamation of the Gospel and ordinarily entrusted to those who have received sacramental ordination. The Church’s discipline in this regard is not a matter of administrative convenience but reflects a theological conviction about the sacramental nature of ecclesial ministry.

The German bishops’ request sought permission to depart from this universal discipline. Rome’s response was therefore not merely a rejection of a local proposal but a reaffirmation of principles that the Catholic Church understands as belonging to her sacramental constitution. Whatever pastoral arguments may be advanced in favour of lay preaching, the issue cannot be reduced to questions of efficiency, inclusion, or local preference. The Church’s liturgical life is received, not invented. It is handed on, not reconstructed according to the desires of a particular age or culture.

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By Deacon Stephen Morgan, Rector and Professor at the University of St. Joseph, Macao, China.

Cardinal Robert McElroy’s homily to the 2026 Outreach conference deserves serious attention. It is not merely another intervention in the Church’s continuing debates about sexuality, pastoral practice and inclusion. It is a concise statement of a wider theological method that has become increasingly influential in certain ecclesial circles. Its significance lies less in what it says explicitly than in the assumptions that structure its argument.

The homily is carefully crafted. McElroy speaks warmly of holiness, redemption, integrity, chastity and the rejection of sin. He explicitly rejects the notion that mercy makes sin irrelevant. Much of this is unobjectionable. Indeed, faithful Catholics should welcome any renewed emphasis on God’s mercy and the universal call to holiness. Yet the homily also contains a series of claims which, when taken together, point towards a conception of doctrine and pastoral practice that sits uneasily with the Catholic tradition as articulated by Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

The central issue is not whether doctrine develops. It does. The central issue is whether development can become reversal.

The most memorable phrase in the homily is also its most problematic. “Mercy is God’s first word to us.” The statement is rhetorically effective. It captures something important about God’s initiative in salvation. Yet it is neither scripturally precise nor theologically adequate.

The first word God speaks in Scripture is not mercy but creation: “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3). More importantly, throughout the biblical narrative mercy is never detached from truth, holiness and judgment. Adam and Eve encounter God’s judgment before they receive the promise of redemption. Israel repeatedly experiences both divine mercy and divine correction. The prophets speak of forgiveness, but always in conjunction with repentance and conversion.

The same pattern appears in the New Testament. John the Baptist begins his ministry with the call to repentance. Christ does the same. “Repent, and believe in the Gospel” (Mark 1:15) is the inaugural proclamation of Jesus’ public ministry. Peter’s first sermon at Pentecost culminates in the same demand. Mercy enters the Christian life through the gateway of conversion.

This point is not a minor one. It stands at the heart of the Catholic understanding of redemption. Mercy does not abolish truth. Mercy presupposes truth. Mercy addresses a condition that requires healing. If there is no sin, there is no need for mercy. If there is no objective moral order, mercy becomes little more than affirmation.

Joseph Ratzinger devoted much of his theological career to resisting precisely this separation of mercy from truth. In Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI wrote that “without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality” (Caritas in Veritate, §3). Love becomes detached from reality. It loses substance. It becomes vulnerable to manipulation by cultural fashion and subjective preference.

The same is true of mercy. Mercy without truth becomes sentimentality. It ceases to call men and women to conversion. It ceases to challenge the structures of sin. It ceases to transform. It merely confirms.

Ratzinger returned repeatedly to this theme. In Truth and Tolerance, he argued that Christian charity depends upon confidence that truth exists and can be known. Once truth becomes subordinate to experience, mercy loses its Christian character and becomes indistinguishable from mere affirmation. Such an approach may appear compassionate, but it ultimately deprives the sinner of the very gift he most needs: liberation through truth.

This tension emerges again when McElroy describes mercy as “the ambient culture of the church.” The phrase is attractive. It sounds pastoral. Yet it risks placing mercy in a position traditionally occupied by a richer constellation of realities.

The Church has understood herself as the Body of Christ, the sacrament of salvation, the communion of saints and the guardian of divine revelation. Mercy belongs within that identity. It is indispensable to it. But the Church’s life is also constituted by truth, worship, justice, holiness, repentance and charity. These realities are not competitors. They are mutually dependent.

A Church defined principally by mercy soon becomes uncomfortable with judgment. A Church uncomfortable with judgment becomes suspicious of doctrine. A Church suspicious of doctrine eventually becomes embarrassed by Christ’s moral demands. This is not a hypothetical concern. It is a pattern repeatedly visible in the history of modern Christianity. Liberal Protestantism did not begin by rejecting doctrine outright. It began by subordinating doctrine to pastoral and cultural concerns. Once that process commenced, doctrinal revision became increasingly difficult to resist.

The most significant section of McElroy’s homily concerns neither mercy nor holiness but the Church’s relationship with the LGBT community.

He speaks of a Church that has “frequently wounded the LGBT community through judgmentalism and exclusion.” Every Catholic should acknowledge that genuine wounds have occurred. Cruelty, ridicule, discrimination and neglect are incompatible with the Gospel.

Yet the crucial question remains unanswered. What exactly does McElroy mean by “judgmentalism”?

Does he refer to failures of charity? If so, few would disagree.

Or does the term include the Church’s teaching itself?

The ambiguity matters because contemporary ecclesiastical debates frequently depend upon precisely such ambiguities. The language of pastoral failure gradually merges with the language of doctrinal disagreement. Opposition to cruelty becomes opposition to doctrine. The implication, often left unstated, is that the Church’s principal wound is not her failure to live according to her teaching but the teaching itself.

This suspicion becomes stronger when McElroy identifies recent developments as “rich seeds for the unfolding of the Gospel.” The phrase immediately raises a theological question. What exactly is unfolding?

Catholics have always believed that the Church’s understanding of revelation unfolds over time. Newman devoted an entire book to explaining how this occurs. Yet development is not an unlimited concept. Not every change constitutes development. Some changes are corruptions. Some are reversals. Some are contradictions.

The decisive question is whether McElroy is describing a deeper pastoral application of existing doctrine or suggesting that doctrine itself is undergoing transformation.

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Written by C.Huxley for Catholic Unscripted

The English are notoriously preoccupied with the weather. Our unpredictable weather patterns often serve as a source of polite, uncontentious conversation. Usually, it is mild, offering us the opportunity to recount self-deprecating tales of getting drenched by an unexpected downpour or getting horribly sunburnt because we forgot that such things can happen in England. Plus ça change!

Occasionally, weather-talk has more potency. Last night, a vast and spectacular thunderstorm swept across large parts of the island of Great Britain, bringing house fires started by lightning strikes and flash flooding. It was weather we might describe as Biblical. This raises an interesting question. Why is it, in the era of modern meteorology, that people instinctively look for meaning in the weather, especially when it coincides with momentous events in our temporal lives?

In Medieval times, people often over-interpreted weather and celestial events. Halley’s comet is memorialised in the Bayeux tapestry’s telling of the defeat of the Anglo-Saxons at the Battle of Hastings. Chroniclers interpreted the eclipse on the night Richard III’s wife died in 1485 as an ill omen of his impending doom.

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At the recent funeral of Cardinal Camillo Camillo Ruini the Pope presided calling him “a wise and dilligent shepherd”. He died in Rome on Tuesday at the age of 95.

The publication of the full spiritual testament of Cardinal Ruini has revealed far more than the final reflections of one of the most influential churchmen of modern Italy. It has offered an unexpectedly candid glimpse into the mind of a man who stood at the centre of ecclesiastical life during the pontificates of St John Paul II and Benedict XVI and who, while expressing filial loyalty towards Pope Francis, quietly acknowledged a profound unease regarding the direction in which the Church had travelled. And it is really quite beautiful in all its aspects.

Pope Leo XIV in his funeral homily, drew attention to the cardinal’s spiritual testament. Yet it was not the Vatican that released the complete text. That task fell to the traditionalist publication Messa in Latino, which stated that it was publishing the document in full precisely to ensure that it would not be “cut” or amended. According to reports subsequently published by Ad Vaticanum, individuals close to the cardinal were concerned that some passages, particularly those relating to the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and to Pope Francis, might never see the light of day.

Such concerns themselves reveal something of the atmosphere which has characterised recent years. For the testament of Camillo Ruini is remarkable not because it contains a direct criticism of Pope Francis, still less because it advances some ideological programme, but because it embodies something increasingly rare in contemporary ecclesiastical discourse. It is the voice of a senior churchman speaking with honesty, humility and spiritual sobriety.

Throughout the text, Ruini’s overwhelming tone is one of gratitude and repentance. He thanks God for the gift of faith, for the priesthood, for his family, friends and collaborators, and for the many years granted to him in service of the Church. He confesses his sins, laments the poverty of his faith and repeatedly asks forgiveness from those whom he may have wounded by what he describes as his own “substantial harshness”. The entire document breathes the atmosphere of a soul preparing itself for judgement rather than attempting to shape its own legacy.

Yet it is impossible to ignore the ecclesial reflections which emerge naturally from this examination of conscience. Ruini’s account of the Second Vatican Council is particularly revealing. He gives thanks for having lived through the Council and for helping to implement its teachings in Reggio Emilia. At the same time, he thanks God for having given him “the clarity and strength to oppose the distortions that followed the Council”. This sentence is of considerable significance because it reveals the hermeneutic which guided Ruini’s entire ecclesiastical career. He was neither a reactionary opponent of Vatican II nor an advocate of the endless experimentation which so often followed in its wake. He belonged instead to that generation represented by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, which sought to distinguish the Council itself from the post-conciliar upheavals carried out in its name.

This same interpretive framework sheds light on his final remarks concerning Pope Francis. Ruini recalls that he rejoiced at Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s election and immediately sought to support him. Even in his last years he remained grateful for what he calls Francis’ “extraordinary missionary and evangelising zeal”. There is no trace of bitterness or personal grievance. Yet the following words possess an unmistakable gravity.

“I must confess that I find myself in a state of unease, not for personal reasons, certainly, but because I struggle to understand certain directions that seem to me to reopen wounds which, after the Council, had only with difficulty been healed.”

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There are crimes so terrible that they force us to confront not merely the depravity of individual men, but the assumptions of the age in which we live. The appalling abuse and murder of a vulnerable child by those entrusted with his care (see this report from the BBC) belongs among those dark moments which compel society to look beyond the courtroom and ask deeper questions. Human wickedness is tragically universal, Saint Augustine said: “I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself.” (From Confessions). Yet moments such as these oblige us to consider the moral and anthropological foundations upon which we have chosen to build our common life.

Catholics have always begun not with the desires of adults, but with the dignity of the child. A child is not a possession, a project, a bauble, a status symbol or the fulfilment of an emotional aspiration. He or she is a person, created in the image and likeness of God, possessing rights which precede the claims of those who would raise him. Modern society increasingly speaks of the rights of adults to become parents, but the language of rights becomes distorted when detached from its proper object. There is no natural right to a child. There are, however, rights belonging to the child himself.

Yet the conflict which brought Catholic adoption agencies to extinction was never merely about law or discrimination. Beneath the headlines lay a far more fundamental question, one which reaches to the heart of what it means to be human. Is parenthood ordered primarily towards the desires of adults, or towards the rights and flourishing of children? And what happens to a civilisation when it forgets the difference?

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The Archbishop is right to do so. Indeed, anyone familiar with the Church’s teaching on the sanctity of life would expect nothing less. Yet his intervention raises a deeper question. Is it enough for one bishop, however sincere and well informed, to issue another statement on what may prove to be one of the most consequential moral questions facing Britain in the twenty-first century?

To be fair, the Catholic bishops have not been silent. Throughout the passage of the Bill they have issued statements, organised Holy Hours, encouraged Catholics to write to their MPs, mobilised parish campaigns and repeatedly warned of the dangers inherent in the legislation. Cardinal Nichols himself took the unusual step of urging Catholics nationally to lobby their representatives, something he has done only on the rarest occasions. Archbishop Sherrington has been consistent and courageous in his opposition, repeatedly describing the Bill as flawed both in principle and in practice. He was invited on to Catholic Unscripted to talk about this, but sadly he refused.

So the question is not whether the bishops have spoken, some clearly have. The question is whether they have spoken with a volume and urgency commensurate with what is at stake. For the issue before Parliament is not merely another contested item of social policy. It is not comparable to debates over taxation, planning regulations or public spending priorities. Assisted suicide strikes at something more fundamental. It concerns the most basic and indispensable of all human rights: the right to life itself.

Every other right presupposes the existence of the person who possesses it. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, democratic participation and legal equality all rest upon a prior assumption that human life possesses an inherent dignity worthy of protection. Once the principle is accepted that some lives may be intentionally ended because they are judged no longer worth living, or because death is presented as a therapeutic solution to suffering, the moral foundation upon which every other right rests begins to shift.

This is why the Church has always regarded euthanasia and assisted suicide as uniquely serious matters. The prohibition against the deliberate taking of innocent human life is not an arbitrary religious rule. It is one of the first principles of natural law and one of the foundational pillars of civilisation itself.

Supporters of assisted suicide typically frame the debate in terms of autonomy, compassion and personal choice. Such language possesses an immediate emotional appeal. Nobody wishes to see another human being suffer. Nobody wishes to witness pain, fear or indignity in the final stages of life. Yet the crucial question is whether the deliberate facilitation of suicide represents a genuine solution to suffering or whether it fundamentally alters society’s understanding of medicine, care and human dignity.

Opponents of the legislation have repeatedly pointed to evidence from overseas jurisdictions where laws initially introduced under narrow and tightly controlled circumstances have gradually expanded beyond their original limits. What begins as an exceptional provision for a small number of terminally ill patients frequently evolves into something much broader. The logic of autonomy rarely remains confined within its original boundaries. If personal choice is the governing principle, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain why that choice should be restricted to particular categories of suffering or particular groups of people.

Equally troubling is the question of vulnerability. Advocates of assisted suicide often present the issue as one of individual freedom. Yet human beings do not make decisions in a vacuum. The elderly, the disabled, those suffering from loneliness, depression or feelings of burden upon their families may experience subtle pressures that are impossible to measure in legislation. The fear expressed by many disability rights organisations is not simply that vulnerable people might choose assisted suicide. It is that they may come to feel they ought to choose it.

The concern is not hypothetical. It is rooted in an understanding of human nature. We are social creatures whose decisions are shaped by expectations, relationships and circumstances. A society that increasingly presents assisted suicide as a rational and dignified response to suffering inevitably sends a message about which lives are valued and which lives are regarded as burdensome.

There is also the profound question of medicine itself. The historic vocation of the physician has always been to heal where possible, to care where cure is no longer available and never intentionally to bring about death. Assisted suicide represents a radical departure from that tradition. It transforms the doctor from healer into facilitator of death and alters the relationship of trust between patient and physician in ways that cannot easily be reversed.

Nor should the implications for palliative care be overlooked. Britain possesses a hospice movement admired throughout the world. The answer to suffering has traditionally been greater compassion, better pain management, stronger family support and more comprehensive palliative care. The danger is that assisted suicide becomes not an addition to such care but a substitute for it. Where resources are limited and care is expensive, the temptation to offer death as a solution rather than care as a vocation becomes increasingly difficult to resist.

Seen in this light, the frustration expressed by many Catholics becomes easier to understand. Their complaint is not that Archbishop Sherrington has failed to speak. It is that a matter of such gravity appears not to have elicited an equally dramatic response from the Church’s leadership as a whole.

Historically, bishops have often spoken with extraordinary clarity when they believed fundamental moral truths were under threat. The English martyrs resisted state interference in matters of conscience at the cost of their lives. Nineteenth-century bishops fought fierce battles over Catholic education. Across the centuries the Church has repeatedly demonstrated that there are moments when measured institutional statements are insufficient and when a more visible and prophetic witness becomes necessary.

Many Catholics believe this is one of those moments.

Perhaps the bishops have done more than their critics acknowledge. Perhaps much of their work has taken place quietly behind the scenes. Yet there remains a widespread sense that Britain is approaching a watershed in its understanding of life, death and human dignity. If that judgement is correct, future generations may look back on this debate not as a technical dispute over end-of-life legislation but as a defining moment in the moral history of the nation.

The reintroduction of the Bill should therefore prompt more than disappointment. It should provoke a renewed examination of what is truly at stake. For the question before Parliament is not simply whether some people should be permitted assistance in ending their lives. The deeper question is whether a society founded upon the equal dignity of every human person wishes to cross a threshold from which it may prove exceedingly difficult to return.

When the law begins to teach that some lives are candidates for intentional termination, it is not merely changing a policy. It is changing a principle. And principles, once surrendered, are rarely recovered without cost.

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Written for Catholic Unscripted by C.Huxley

This week a by-election in the constituency of Makerfield, a semi-rural area sandwiched between Manchester and Liverpool, is dominating the British headlines. Ordinarily it would be of little interest, as the Labour Party will continue to enjoy a huge majority in Parliament regardless of the outcome. But this time it is different. A Labour win could result in a challenge to Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership, while a Reform UK win, in this once safe Labour seat, will be seen as a bellwether heralding the collapse of Labour into obscurity. It has been a century since we last experienced such a cataclysmic shift, after the Representation of the People Act 1918 changed voter demographics so dramatically that Labour displaced the Liberals as the principal party of the left, such that the Liberals would never again form a government.

But there is another reason this by-election is interesting. It is the first time that the new party Restore Britain will put forward a candidate, and it seems every arm of the British establishment is vehemently against them. They are being treated as Reform UK mark 2 and are tarred with the same accusations once levelled at them. The Times published the results of a small telephone poll indicating that Restore is splitting the right-wing vote and preventing a Reform victory. The Daily Mail published a hit piece describing the party as the ‘new home for neo-Nazis’ because a young party member attended a remigration summit in Europe. The Telegraph claims that the party’s leader, Rupert Lowe, sees every government problem as ‘malign’, thereby hinting that he is an irrational conspiracy theorist. Terms like ‘ethno-nationalist’ and ‘racist’ have been flung at them, despite there being no racial elements to any of their policies.

Restore Britain is far more than a populist anti-immigration party. The clue is in the name. The party promises to restore to the British public something that has been lost. This is touching people at a visceral level. Even those too young to remember what Britain was before its descent into a quagmire of sclerotic bureaucracy, over-taxation and demographic instability driven by unprecedented population churn, have been heard saying ‘I just want my country back’.

We British have an innate sense of what our social contract should feel like. As Edmund Burke understood, our society is held together not merely by laws and institutions, but by customs, traditions and understandings passed from one generation to the next. Like a Canada goose using its innate sensory compass to navigate a migration route learnt from earlier generations, we may not always be able to explain those inheritances, but we know when we have strayed from them. What we are living with now is a poor shadow of our birthright and it is causing a primal wound. While all parties make appropriate noises from time to time, Restore Britain is the only party that is unequivocal in acknowledging this wound and offering practical ways to heal it.

The British social contract traces its roots back a thousand years to Anglo Saxon England, when the folk-right (customary laws of the common people) were the bedrock of our legal system, giving us the grassroots-up model to jurisprudence that became the Common Law. This is fundamentally different in character from top-down legal systems like the Napoleonic Code. In our tradition of law, everything is legal unless expressly made illegal. Consequently, we have traditionally focussed on the freedom of the individual, rather than their civic duties.

It is no coincidence that Magna Carta, with its requirement that the Sovereign operate within the law, that everyone have access to due process and a fair trial, and that taxation must have consent, should emerge from a people with a history of folk-right. The ordinary English peasant enjoyed relative freedom and, should he face criminal charges, the right to a jury of his peers. Today our Justice Secretary, David Lammy, wishes to take this ancient liberty away from us, except in the most serious cases, on the spurious grounds that removing the jury would speed up the court backlog.

Atop the Old Bailey in London there is a giant golden statue of a woman with scales for weighing evidence in one hand and a sword for authority in the other. She is Lady Justice, one of the most famous legal symbols in the world, dating back to Ancient Rome and symbolising the reliable impartiality of the justice meted out beneath her. The social contract demands that we trust that this is the case, yet the principle of equality before the law has been systematically undermined in recent decades through the iterative impact of successive pieces of legislation that prioritise modern civic ‘human rights’ over the ancient natural rights and liberties upon which our legal system was founded.

The Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010 might sound as if they would reinforce our age-old tradition of equality before the law, but they do the precise opposite. Rather, they are the embodiment of Animal Farm, when the farm animals are told ‘all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ In modern Britain, the state has legislated to provide protections that make specific minorities ‘more equal’ than the majority. These carve-outs reflect contemporary concerns and the implications were so ill thought through that no consideration was made for the incompatibility of competing rights claims from different minority groups. Women’s rights to privacy were pitted against transgender rights to inclusion. The result of this was that a previously common-sense understanding of UK workplaces legislation regarding the provision single sex lavatories and changing facilities, went all the way to the Supreme Court, as an employer tried and failed to argue that male-bodied transwomen were entitled to use the same facilities.

The government was aware from the beginning that these carve-outs hurt the general population. The Senior Law Lord who oversaw these changes, Lord Bingham, told the Law Society in 2005 that it was natural that these changes ‘should provoke howls of criticism by politicians and the mass media’ who ‘generally reflect the majority opinion’. In another speech in 2008 he agreed that our human rights legislation is ‘in one sense undemocratic in that it is counter-majoritarian’.

Twenty years ago, the implications might have seemed abstract and victimless, but the downstream effect has been pernicious. We have seen the implementation of preferential treatment for minorities at every level in our society, from student work experience opportunities to Royal Air Force recruitment. Last year the Sentencing Council published guidance that triggered criticism from MPs because it recommended pre-sentence reports in certain cases involving ethnic minority offenders.

Policing in Britain was founded on the Peelite principle that ‘the police are the public and the public are the police’. This was very much within the English tradition that trust in public institutions is established through the people’s consent and participation. Today, accusations of two-tier policing have become a daily occurrence and are no longer deniable. Most upsettingly, we have recently seen footage of Hampshire police’s rough-handling and arrest of the dying teenager Henry Nowak contrasted with their pastoral concern for the wellbeing of his murderer Vickrum Digwa. We also heard that Hampshire police tried repeatedly to stain Henry’s reputation with false accusations of racism. The response from the state was to blame Reform UK’s Nigel Farage for using the term ‘cold rage’, as if those who express horror are more culpable than a system that fails a teenager in need.

The inversion of our social contract has become deadly. While other parties indicate small commitments to change, Restore Britain has gone full throttle: demanding the abolition of all ‘two-tier guidance’, the sacking of all senior police leaders and the abolition of all DEI roles. Theirs is a scorched earth approach on the grounds that because police promotions have been dependent on adherence to DEI, an entirely fresh start is required.

Since the Middle Ages, long predating our modern democracy, England has had a representative government, whereby everyone in the land was deemed to be represented in parliament either in person or by their representative. While voting was restricted to land-owning or affluent men, nevertheless, they elected Knights of the Shire and Burgesses to send to Parliament. This might sound terribly Tolkien-esque, but these representatives formed what is now called the House of Commons, upholding the interests of their local area, approving taxes and making laws.

In recent times, this direct relationship with our representatives in parliament has been undermined by party headquarters parachuting in their own chosen shortlist of potential candidates, often with no relationship to the local area. The result is that the MP’s loyalty more naturally lies with the party, rather than with the people they are supposed to represent. This is not merely an administrative problem. As Roger Scruton observed, people are most willing to trust institutions when they feel a sense of ownership and attachment towards them. The further decision-making is removed from local communities, the more politics becomes something done to people rather than by them. Restore Britain is quietly rectifying this by building a grassroots movement in which branch members will have more autonomy to set local priorities and choose their candidate for MP.

Perhaps more egregious has been the undermining of Parliament itself. The Palace of Westminster is where our elected representatives are meant to wield power on our behalf. They are meant to have the power to enact and dissolve legislation, critique it in debate and vote against it if it does not serve their constituents well.

It may therefore come as a surprise to hear that, if you watch Prime Minister’s Questions today, you will not hear serious engagement of matters of state. Not only does Starmer refuse to answer challenging questions, but there is often little of magnitude to discuss. The Mother of Parliaments is reduced to a mothers’ meeting, hearing tales of small fundraisers and free school meals. Why? Because the power vested in parliament by us was moved sideways by Tony Blair’s government into hundreds of unelected and unaccountable ‘quangos’ (quasi-non-governmental organisations) that supposedly offer neutral expertise. The Sentencing Council is one of them, and between them they govern almost every aspect of modern life. Consequently, our politicians make promises they can’t deliver and the public become frustrated and feel lied to. Public ire should really be directed at the quango directors, but few of us know who they are or what they are responsible for, let alone how to remove them.

There are myriad other ways in which our ancient liberties have been diluted or lost in recent years, with more in the pipeline. Historian Prof. David Starkey has provided the most comprehensive diagnosis of the ailment and is touring the country on an evangelical mission to garner support for his proposed medicine: The Great Repeal Act. This would see all modern legislation that has undermined the social contract and disempowered parliament removed from the statute book, with further legislation brought forward to shore up our distinctive traditions of governance and jurisprudence. It is a daunting undertaking, so it is perhaps no surprise that other right-wing parties have only committed to minor tweaks. Restore Britain is committed to the entire package. It is this, above all, that marks the party out as different: A real commitement to the restoration of our historic constitutional settlement. We need this now, before it is too late.

It was our goddaughter’s First Holy Communion on Saturday.

The parish was new to us. The church was full, as you might imagine, and we found seats upstairs overlooking the nave below. Having attended the Tridentine Latin Mass for some years now, and a relatively reverent new rite mass before that, it had been a long time since I had experienced what might be called a very modern Mass.

It’s important to say at the outset that the priest was clearly sincere.

He spoke about the importance of Confession. He invited non-Catholics to attend the parish’s OCIA programme. He spoke warmly and earnestly about Jesus. This was not a man who lacked faith, he genuinely believed that those children were about to receive Jesus Christ for the first time. Not symbolically or metaphorically, but Our Lord Himself; Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.

And that is what made the whole thing so strangely sad, because he seemed unable to trust that the liturgy itself could communicate what he believed.

From the moment Mass began, I found my attention drifting. I thought about the errands I needed to run, whether Sainsbury’s would still be open afterwards, whether I had replied to my dad about the electricity bill he had queried. I kept willing myself back to prayerfulness, but everything appeared to thwart my efforts.

The hymn lyrics, along with the responses, were projected onto a large screen at the front of the church. The children came forward to read what turned out to be a simplified paraphrasing of scripture designed to communicate the general gist of St Paul’s words in a child friendly way. Then the priest preached an earnest homily before moving to the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

After the consecration, the children were invited to gather around the altar.

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David Hockney died yesterday. This was met with the compulsory outpouring of grief from all the usual sources, led by King Charles III who described him as a ‘Giant of the art world’. A man, Charles tells us, who was ‘One of life’s true originals’. In truth however, his art was crap and he was far from original.

When I was about 7 years old I remember being in my uncle Brians house in Fulham. He worked with Nick Serota to establish the Tate Modern, and had, in his hallway, a picture of a bloke in a pool. I remember how ugly I thought it was and how weird it seemed that my uncle had it hanging there. I asked him who was in the painting. ‘It’s a Hockney’ he said. I didn’t know what he meant. 10 years later I would have said ‘It looks gay’. And it was.

Hockney has been described as a towering pioneer of queer art, who lived openly as a ‘gay man’ long before homosexuality was decriminialised. Hockney openly described his early, intimate depictions of gay love and desire as a necessary form of ‘propaganda’ for a subject that had been largely ignored.

Well Hockney must have died a happy man, having witnessed the fruit of his efforts. It’s remarkable how quickly we have moved from a country that had some sense of decency and restraint, to one that legitimises and celebrates sterile sex and ‘orgasm addicts’.

In a recent conversation we had with Frank Wright, he said;

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Frank Wright

Reality reviewer.

and see his recommended reading list here:

Frank Wright

My Reading List

I have been asked lately to produce a book list, as I talk about books rather a lot…

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a month ago · 321 likes · 66 comments · Frank Wright

In this wide-ranging conversation, Frank Wright joins Catholic Unscripted to discuss the spiritual, political, and cultural crisis facing Britain and the West. Drawing on the Catholic Social Teaching of Pope Leo XII…

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The speed with which ecclesiastical weather can change is one of the more remarkable features of Church life. For more than a decade, many Catholics had the distinct impression that certain questions could no longer be asked. Concerns from informed laity but even from Cardinals about Amoris Laetitia were dismissed as rigidity or simply ignored. Reservations about synodality were treated as resistance to the Holy Spirit…or at least The Spirit (™). To raise objections was often to find oneself assigned to the category of the troublesome, the nostalgic or the fearful. Or maybe find yourself without a job, like Bishop Joseph Strickland. So much for dialogue and journeying together eh?

But now, in recent weeks something rather striking has happened.

Just days before the visit of Pope Leo XIV to Spain, Archbishop Luis Argüello, President of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, issued a pastoral clarification stating that Catholics who have entered a new union while a valid sacramental marriage still exists may not receive Holy Communion. The statement amounted to a direct reaffirmation of the perennial sacramental discipline of the Church and, in practical terms, stood in obvious tension with the interpretation of Amoris Laetitia that dominated much of the Francis era.

Now another development has emerged from Poland.

A group of Polish Catholics led by Dr Artur Dąbrowski, President of Catholic Action in the Archdiocese of Częstochowa, has published a lengthy open letter denouncing the Final Document of the Synod on Synodality. The letter accuses the Synod of subordinating the Deposit of Faith to process, ambiguity and inclusivity, warning that the Church risks being transformed from a divinely instituted guardian of revealed truth into a permanently evolving forum of discussion. The authors do not merely express reservations. They describe the document as “deeply anti-Catholic” and call upon bishops to abandon diplomatic evasions and state clearly where they stand. What is noteworthy is not simply the content of these interventions but their timing.

For years now, many bishops, priests and lay Catholics privately expressed concerns about the trajectory of the Francis pontificate. Some worried about the confusion generated by Amoris Laetitia. Others feared that synodality was gradually becoming less a method of consultation and more a mechanism for introducing theological and pastoral changes that could not easily be justified through the Church’s ordinary doctrinal categories (as we have discussed in depth many times now on Catholic Unscripted). Many believed that doctrinal clarity was increasingly giving way to pastoral ambiguity. Yet sadly, relatively few were prepared to say so publicly.

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There is a kind of stunned silence hanging over the United Kingdom today. It is becoming an all too regular occurrence. The horrific attack in Belfast has once again exposed a widening chasm between the governing classes and the people they claim to represent. Following another violent incident involving a man believed to be a Sudanese immigrant, many ordinary citizens are reacting with anger, frustration and a growing sense that those who shape public discourse either do not understand what is happening in the country or are unwilling to speak honestly about it. Almost immediately, the familiar script unfolded. Political leaders rightly condemned the attack and urged calm. Yet many citizens feel that the wider questions raised by the incident are once again being treated primarily as a problem of public perception rather than public policy. Concerns about immigration, integration and social cohesion are being quickly overshadowed by warnings about misinformation, extremism and the dangers of inflaming tensions. Whether justified or not, many people are left with the impression that the anxieties of ordinary citizens are being managed rather than addressed.

Yet the difficulty remains. People continue to observe realities that appear increasingly at odds with the assurances they receive. They remember the grooming gang scandals in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and elsewhere, where vulnerable girls were systematically abused while authorities looked the other way for fear of appearing racist. They witness imported sectarian tensions, parallel communities and growing social fragmentation. They see attacks on native populations reported with remarkable caution while concerns about social cohesion are routinely dismissed. Whether every concern is justified is not the point. The point is that millions of people increasingly believe that the institutions governing them no longer trust them with the truth.

This growing alienation is not confined to politics. It has found its way into the Church as well. For many years, the bishops of England and Wales have spoken consistently and passionately about the dignity of migrants and refugees. On this they are entirely correct. Every human being, regardless of nationality, ethnicity or religion, is made in the image of God and possesses an inviolable dignity that must be respected. Christians have a clear obligation to show charity to the stranger and compassion to those fleeing persecution, war or genuine hardship. The difficulty is not what the bishops say. It is what they often fail to say.

The faithful are frequently reminded of their duty to welcome the stranger but are seldom instructed with equal clarity concerning the Church’s teaching on borders, sovereignty, political authority and the common good. As a result, many Catholics are left with the impression that Catholic teaching demands little more than ever greater openness to migration and ever greater suspicion towards those who express concerns about its consequences. Such an impression is profoundly misleading.

The Church has never taught that nations have no right to control their borders. She has never taught that political communities have no right to preserve their cultural inheritance. She has never taught that governments may neglect the welfare of their own citizens in pursuit of abstract humanitarian ideals. Quite the contrary.

The Catechism teaches that prosperous nations should, as far as they are able, welcome the foreigner seeking security and livelihood. Yet the very same paragraph teaches that political authorities may regulate immigration according to the requirements of the common good. This is not an embarrassing qualification appended to an otherwise universal obligation. It is an integral part of the Church’s teaching.

To understand why, we must step back from contemporary political slogans and recover a much older wisdom.

Long before the modern debates about immigration, identity and multiculturalism, the Christian tradition reflected deeply on the nature of political authority. St Augustine described peace as the tranquillity of order. St Thomas Aquinas taught that government exists to preserve the common good and the unity of peace. The Catechism teaches that the common good requires the stability and security of a just order. Throughout the centuries, Catholic thinkers consistently recognised that rulers possess obligations towards the communities entrusted to their care. These obligations are not limited to economic prosperity or physical security. They extend to the preservation of those conditions that enable human beings to flourish together.

This is where contemporary discourse often goes astray. The modern world has become accustomed to thinking of nations primarily in administrative or economic terms. A nation is viewed as a tax base, a labour market or a collection of consumers inhabiting a common territory. Yet the Catholic tradition has always understood political communities more deeply than this.

Human beings are not isolated individuals floating through history. We are born into families. We inherit languages. We receive traditions. We belong to places. We are shaped by stories, customs, symbols and memories that long predate our own existence.

Pope St John Paul II expressed this beautifully when he told UNESCO that “the nation exists through culture and for culture.” Culture, for John Paul, was not an optional adornment. It was one of the principal means through which human beings become fully human. A culture is an inheritance. It embodies accumulated wisdom, moral assumptions, habits, institutions, stories and symbols passed from one generation to the next. To lose such things is not simply to alter a society. It is to impoverish it.

This insight is almost entirely absent from contemporary political discourse. Indeed, modern ideologies often appear incapable of understanding it. The liberal tends to define man primarily as an autonomous bearer of rights. The market liberal frequently sees him as a consumer. The socialist understands him principally as an economic actor. Identity politics defines him through race, sex, sexuality or grievance. The technocrat reduces him to data points requiring management. Each perspective contains a fragment of truth. Yet all ultimately fail because they attempt to understand man apart from God.

The crisis afflicting the West is therefore not primarily demographic, economic or political. It is theological. Having forgotten God, we have forgotten what man is. This is why so many of our public debates feel increasingly detached from reality. We continue to speak about dignity, equality, rights and freedom, yet we struggle to explain why any of these things matter. We preserve the language of Christian civilisation while systematically removing the foundations that once sustained it.

Pope Benedict XVI repeatedly warned that modernity sought to preserve the fruits of Christianity while severing them from their roots. Human dignity, universal rights and equality before the law did not emerge from nowhere. They arose from a specifically Christian understanding of reality. They rest upon the conviction that every human being is created in the image of God and redeemed by Christ. Remove that foundation and the concepts remain for a time, much like cut flowers retain their beauty after being severed from the plant. Eventually, however, they begin to wither.

This becomes particularly evident in the ideology of globalism. Christianity teaches that all men are brothers because all men share a common Father and are called to salvation in Christ. Modern secular universalism attempts to preserve the brotherhood while dispensing with the Father. The result is a vision of humanity united by sentiment rather than truth.

The Christian proclamation that there is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ is transformed into a political project aimed at dissolving distinctions without reference to the transcendent reality that alone gives such unity meaning. The consequences are increasingly visible.

Many people instinctively recognise that something precious is being lost. They see the erosion of social trust. They witness the weakening of shared cultural assumptions. They observe institutions that appear more concerned with managing diversity than cultivating unity. They are told that patriotism is suspect, that national identity is arbitrary and that cultural continuity is little more than nostalgia. Yet these same people often lack the language to articulate what they are experiencing.

This helps explain the rise of populist and nationalist movements throughout the West. The appeal of such movements does not arise primarily from hatred. It arises from a desire for belonging. People wish to preserve their homes, protect their children, maintain social trust and hand on something recognisable to future generations. These instincts are not pathological. They are profoundly human. The tragedy is that they are so often met with contempt. When ordinary citizens raise concerns about immigration, crime, social cohesion or cultural change and are immediately branded racist or xenophobic, they do not abandon those concerns. They simply stop listening to the people condemning them. Every denunciation deepens the sense of alienation. Every accusation confirms their suspicion that the institutions of society no longer understand their lives.

In this respect, the political establishment has become the greatest recruiting sergeant for the very populism it claims to oppose. Yet populism itself cannot provide a complete answer.

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There are moments when a story becomes more significant than the immediate controversy that gave rise to it. The recent revelations surrounding the FBI’s infamous Richmond memorandum on so called “Radical Traditionalist Catholics” appear to be one such moment.

At first glance, the story seems almost absurd. According to information that has emerged through congressional investigations and media reporting, the memorandum was heavily influenced by the case of a disturbed young man with neo-Nazi sympathies who had attended a chapel operated by the Society of St Pius X. This individual, who reportedly suffered from serious mental health problems and made violent threats online, became one of the key reference points in an analysis that sought to identify potential links between traditionalist Catholic communities and domestic extremism.

Had the matter ended there, few would have objected. Law enforcement agencies have both the right and the duty to investigate individuals who make credible threats of violence. That is not controversial. Indeed, it is precisely what citizens expect them to do.

The controversy arose because the focus appeared to shift from the actions of a dangerous individual to suspicion directed towards an entire religious subculture. In the logic of the memorandum, the distinction between investigating a person and scrutinising a community became alarmingly blurred.

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Written by Dr. Anthony McCarthy for Catholic Unscripted

The late Christopher Hitchens, as he toured America to promote his brand of atheism, used to pose a question to his benighted audiences:

“Can you think of a single good act done by a religious person that could not also have been done by a non-religious person?”

Like Pilate, he didn’t wait for an answer, before declaring that no-one could give a satisfactory one. The answer he didn’t wait for would have needed to refer to actions of a religious kind – discerning a vocation, dying for the faith and so on – which Hitchens would no doubt have seen as foolish simply qua religious, thereby begging the question. Yet any pause would have delayed the stentorian delivery of his follow-up question:

“Can anyone think of an evil action performed precisely because of religious faith?”

The truth that question seeks to elicit was expressed more eloquently by the saintly Blaise Pascal and is not one that should bother serious believers, not least because it is obvious that any powerful source of human motivation can effectively be put in the service of evil.

This is even more true of ideologies which seek to suppress moral conscience in the name of an unforgiving non-moral source of inspiration – of the kind Hitchens himself promoted throughout his life (including his tiresome, predictable short journey from Trotskyism to NeoConservatism).

Henry Novak Murder

I was reminded of the power of ideology this week watching footage released by the police concerning the murder of the teenager Henry Nowak in the English port city of Southampton. The police had been called by the brother of a Sikh man who had just stabbed Mr Nowak multiple times. The brother told the police a tale of racial abuse and justified self-defence in the face of a “racist attack”. This victim-narrative appears to have been completely accepted by the police officers who arrived at the scene, where they were confronted with the murderer spinning the same tale and a teenager lying on the ground bleeding to death and repeatedly telling the officers he couldn’t breathe.

The bodycam footage from the police, now publicly available, records an officer listening carefully to the murderer’s tale of racial abuse as Nowak lay dying in front of him. Nowak, with blood filling his mouth, was then moved, in violation of basic first aid principles, so that he could be handcuffed by the officer, who responded to Nowak’s telling him that he had been stabbed, “Don’t think you have, mate.”

Faced with a paradigmatic concrete instance of a suffering victim, the police officer’s instinct was first to treat him as invisible and then, when he registered Nowak’s existence, to handcuff him as a ‘perpetrator’. The last words he would ever hear would be a conversation with his murderer about his ‘racism’ together with the reading of his rights as he was placed under arrest. All this was deemed more crucial than calling an ambulance for an obviously seriously injured man.

Institutional racism

How did we come to this? While it is dangerous to try and hang too much on a single distressing case – a besetting sin of political radicals – it is worth asking what might have caused the inhuman blindness of this officer, evidently accustomed to addressing the public as ‘mate’ but not to using his eyes, ears and judgement.

Back in 1993, a young black man, Stephen Lawrence, was murdered by a group of young white men. The police involved handled the case with Herculean incompetence. That incompetence, which carried with it a very strong whiff of corruption, helped make the case a focal point for racial justice activists who sought to explain it all in terms of police racism. The infamous case led eventually to Lord MacPherson’s influential report on the police, which famously branded the police as ‘institutionally racist’.

The report defined institutional racism as follows:

“The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”

That same report stressed that racist incidents “should be recorded and investigated as such, when they are perceived by the complainant or someone else as acts of racism.” At the time the Report was published some commentators on the political right condemned such directives (though many of the same writers are happy to cite similar reports on ‘antisemitism’ which make reckless use of subjective criteria for identifying ‘incidents’).

The Macpherson Report embedded in the culture the idea of ‘institutional racism’, making use of the idea of structural racism. This did not come out of a clear blue sky.

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