British ambassador warned that pontiff's invitation to disaffected Anglicans to convert left relations with Vatican at 150-year low

The British ambassador to the Vatican warned that Pope Benedict XVI's invitation to Anglican opponents of female priests to convert en masse to Catholicism was so inflammatory that it might lead to discrimination and even violence against Catholics in Britain, according to a secret US diplomatic cable.

Talking to an American diplomat after the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, met the pope in November 2009, Francis Campbell said the surprise Vatican move had placed Williams "in an impossible situation" and "Anglican-Vatican relations were facing their worst crisis in 150 years as a result of the pope's decision".

Campbell's strikingly candid comments are documented in one of a series of confidential dispatches from Washington's Vatican embassy released by WikiLeaks. Others reveal that:

• US diplomats believed the pope was instrumental in securing the release of 15 British sailors captured and held by Iran in 2007.

• The Vatican refused to allow its officials to testify before an Irish commission investigating abuse of children by priests and was angered when they were summoned from Rome.

• The pope was responsible for the Vatican's resistance to Turkey joining the EU and wanted a reference to Europe's "Christian roots" included in the EU constitution.

The revelations come after 12 days of cable releases by WikiLeaks that have dominated headlines around the world and seen the whistleblowers' website and its founder, Julian Assange, vilified by some US politicians and extolled by others – including free speech advocates and the Kremlin. The Guardian is one of five international news organisations which had exclusive access to the cables.

Campbell, himself a Catholic, made his remarks in a conversation with the American deputy chief of mission to the Holy See, Julieta Valls Noyes, after the pope decided to announce a special dispensation allowing disaffected Anglicans to convert in groups while retaining their own leadership and some of their rites, in a body called an Ordinariate.

This had been arranged in Rome behind the backs of the English Catholic bishops, and Williams was given little warning. An official Vatican statement described the November 2009 meeting between Williams and the pontiff as cordial, but Campbell told the US ambassador, theology professor Miguel Diaz, that it was "at times awkward".

At a subsequent dinner held in Williams's honour and attended by senior Vatican officials, Campbell told Noyes "Anglican-Vatican relations were facing their worst crisis in 150 years as a result of the pope's decision", a cable sent to Washington shortly afterwards revealed.

Campbell said: "The crisis is worrisome for England's small, mostly Irish-origin, Catholic minority. There is still latent anti-Catholicism in some parts of England and it may not take much to set it off." He warned: "The outcome could be discrimination or in isolated cases, even violence, against this minority."

The ambassador told Noyes the decision had shifted the goal of the Catholic-Anglican ecumenical dialogue "from true unity to mere co-operation" and claimed that some Vatican officials believed the pope had been wrong not to consult the archbishop before making the announcement.

The cable continued: "The Vatican decision seems to have been aimed primarily at Anglicans in the US and Australia, with little thought given to how it would affect the centre of Anglicanism, England, or the archbishop of Canterbury. Benedict XVI, Campbell said, had put Williams in an impossible situation. If Williams reacted more forcefully, he would destroy decades of work on ecumenical dialogue; by not reacting more harshly, he has lost support among angry Anglicans."

Reporting back to Washington, the US diplomats wonder "whether the damage to inter-Christian relations was worth it – especially since the number of disaffected Anglicans that will convert is likely to be a trickle rather than a wave".

Out of the Church of England's 114 bishops, three have since announced that they will be joining the new Ordinariate, joined by two retired ones. All of them are long-standing opponents of female priests. It is expected that they will be joined by 50 of the church's 10,000 priests with elements of their congregations.

In a separate conversation, Campbell warned Diaz that if many Anglicans decided to convert, the Catholic church in Britain could find itself financially stretched. "Campbell cited the difference between the Anglican stipend and Catholic allowance as chief among them," according to another cable to Washington. "Because of the need to provide for families, Anglican priests are paid far more than their Catholic counterparts. With many parishes already financially stretched, a large transition of Anglican converts could overwhelm the financial resources of many dioceses."

The Catholic church is to set up a fund to finance the Ordinariate in its early days.

Monday, 30 November 2009, 17:19
S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 02 VATICAN 000123
SIPDIS
EO 12958 DECL: 11/30/2034
TAGS PGOV, PREL, PHUM, KIRF, SOCI, UK, VT
SUBJECT: AMIDST CONTROVERSY, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY MEETS POPE
REF: VATICAN 113
VATICAN 00000123 001.2 OF 002
CLASSIFIED BY: Rafael Foley, Pol Chief. REASON: 1.4 (b), (d) 1. (S) Summary: During his recent visit to Rome and meeting with the Pope --planned before the Pope urged disaffected Anglicans to convert to Catholicism-- Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams challenged the position of the Catholic Church on ordination of women and made it clear that the Vatican should have consulted with him before reaching out to the Anglican community. Although Williams' visit to Rome was cast as positive and reinforcing of ecumenical dialogue, it's clear the wounds from this controversy will affect that dialogue negatively (at least for now) and are likely to cast a pall over the Pope's planned state visit to England in 2010. End summary

Official and Public Statements Focus on Positive

--------------------------------------------- ---

2. (SBU) The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, met with Pope Benedict XVI on November 21. The meeting was planned before the Vatican released its new apostolic constitution that facilitates the conversion of Anglicans to Catholicism. Described as "cordial" by Vatican officials in an official statement, the Holy See said "The discussions also focused on recent events affecting relations between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, reiterating the shared will to continue and to consolidate the ecumenical relationship between Catholics and Anglicans." Notwithstanding this upbeat Vatican characterization of the meeting, Williams used it to draw clear lines between Anglican and Catholic core beliefs. He presented the Pope with a copy of a lecture he delivered in Rome on November 19, in which he challenged the Vatican's position on the ordination of women, the authority of the papacy, and the role and relation of local churches to a centralized governing structure.

3. (U) Speaking with Vatican Radio shortly after the meeting, Williams stressed his prior good relations with the Pope and downplayed the importance of the Vatican's new procedure for receiving Anglicans into the Catholic Church. However, he did express misgivings about how the new procedure was announced. In order to prevent negative fall-out during the Pope's planned 2010 state visit to England, Williams recommended in the interview that the Pope tread carefully while in England when discussing the late Cardinal Henry Newman (1801-1890). (Note: Newman, a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism, may be recognized as a "blessed" model for Catholics -- beatified -- during the Pope's visit.) Williams said he had asked the Pope to speak about Newman as a great British intellectual, and not just as a convert.

~But Private Discussions Reveal a Deeper Rift

---------------------------------------------

4. (S) Archbishop Williams was the guest of honor at a dinner on Nov. 20 hosted by the British Ambassador to the Holy See, Francis Campbell, for senior Vatican officials. Campbell told the Ambassador that the tone of the conversation was respectful but at times awkward. Campbell (protect) believes the Vatican's move shifted the goal of the Catholic-Anglican ecumenical dialogue from true unity to mere cooperation. He further noted that some Vatican officials themselves believe that Williams should have been consulted --instead of simply told-- about the apostolic constitution. (Comment: Campbell was probably referring to Cardinal Kasper, who runs the Council for Christian Unity. End Comment)

5. (S) In a subsequent conversation with DCM after Williams' departure, Campbell (strictly protect) said Anglican-Vatican relations were facing their worst crisis in 150 years as a result of the Pope's decision. The Vatican decision seems to have been aimed primarily at Anglicans in the U.S. and Australia, with little thought given to how it would affect the center of Anglicanism, England, or the Archbishop of Canterbury. Benedict XVI, Campbell said, had put Williams in an impossible situation. If Williams reacted more forcefully, he would destroy decades of work on ecumenical dialogue; by not reacting

VATICAN 00000123 002.2 OF 002

more harshly, he has lost support among angry Anglicans. The crisis is also worrisome for England's small, mostly Irish-origin, Catholic minority, Campbell said. There is still latent anti-Catholicism in some parts of England and it may not take much to set it off. The outcome could be discrimination or in isolated cases, even violence, against this minority. As for the Pope's visit next year to England, Campbell said he now expected a chilly reception, especially from the Royal family - which was not a great supporter of ecumenical dialogue even before the crisis.

Comment

-------

6. (S) Williams' previously planned meeting with the Pope unquestionably came at an awkward time, but was also important that it happen in order to start healing the damage caused by the Vatican's outreach to Anglicans. The visit also gave Williams an opportunity to recover some lost stature by challenging the Catholic Church during his visit. As reported previously (reftel), the Vatican decision to go after disaffected Anglicans undercut Cardinal Kasper, and it now seems the decision may cast a pall on the Pope's visit to England next year. In the end, some may wonder whether the damage to inter-Christian relations was worth it - especially since the number of disaffected Anglicans that will convert is likely to be a trickle rather than a wave. End comment. DIAZ

From the Rev. Chris Appleby of St. Thomas Burwood Anglican Church in Melbourne, Australia, here is an audio sermon on The Foundation of Leadership, based on Joshua 1. In this sermon, Rev. Appleby talks about how we can have good leadership in the Church: “Choose leaders who have been called to leadership by God, choose [...]

Source : Prydain

An Australian atheist reflects on her experience of teaching in faith schools, and their future at the hands of the technologically-savvy children of the 21st century. Guest post by Kylie Sturgess.

It is 1999 and I am told that, as an employee of the nation of Islam, one of my duties is to supervise the female students of the college while they participate in Dhuhr. I make sure that my brightly dyed Coke-label red hair (invisible in the course of everyday work) is even more firmly sealed under my hijab and go to the second floor of the mosque to sit quietly in a corner and observe.

It's my job. I'm an atheist who works for religious schools and I'm not ashamed of it. It pays about the same, or slightly more, than working in the public system and (as I discovered during a career spanning slightly over ten years), these places are happy to hire me. It's not without teachers' union battles, nor additional hours of work — neither is it exempt from the usual responsibilities and stress that many teachers face. These people hire me to work as an educator. That's what I think I do.

Upon graduating from a Catholic university I discovered that whenever I became employed in the secondary school private system, there was an automatic assumption that I must be a member of the faith. However, 'which faith?' was never raised by my employers - particularly when working as an English as a Second Language / Dialect teacher. I suspect that one of the reasons why is because there weren't many teachers who chose to take that specialty in their degree.

When I graduated with a diploma of education, my degree required mandatory Theology units, which meant I could be employed in the West Australian Catholic school system. I've enjoyed discussions with Latin-speaking overseas students - even though a snarky Josephite nun made disparaging comments throughout my tutorial on pornography and the Catholic marriage. I didn't get along with everybody, but I loved the look of the campus, enjoyed my Philosophy classes with a lecturer whose PhD was on the works of Nietzsche and saw first-hand the contradictions and tensions felt by those trying to live the 'good Christian life'.

Despite my quiet lack of faith, one of my jobs at an Anglican school had me teaching two years of Christian education along with my English courses. I attribute this to too many required classes scheduled and too few teachers adequately qualified to do the job. Flipping through the hand-written lesson plans (all of us hailing from a range of faiths, from Catholic to some kind of New Age Buddhist to 'I'm not really sure'), we teachers met once a month to puzzle over whether the fifth paragraph was really saying 'blessed are the cheese makers' and whose responsibility it was to make a pretty banner in honour of a visiting dignitary.

Being an atheist in a religious school doesn't come without a crisis of confidence. I've heard homilies that claimed that Nostradamus was somehow equivalent to Jesus with his prophecies. That overcoming drug addiction was only possible with the grace of God. Even finding the best parking space at the local casino apparently depends on how many in the car can chorus the 'Hail Mary' in unison. I would help track down absconders from chapel and tentatively developed a short list of 'meditations you could do during the homily if you really can't handle it' for the more militant, trapped teenager.

Am I part of the problem of religious indoctrination that is claimed to happen at such institutions? I openly sympathise and defend my handful of Muslim students who silently fume during their observance of Ramadan, when they're faced with end-of-term tutorial parties with snacks like ham-laden pizzas. When school counselors negotiated and commiserated with the occasional crisis of faith among students, I saw similar crisis points among my colleagues. In the staffroom, we watched a fuzzy broadcast of the 9/11 tragedy and tried to come to terms with how to handle colleagues who turned to fundamentalist beliefs in times of grief and loss.

Religion provides many answers to those in times of crisis, because that's one of the things religion offers to people, whether they're considered the right answers or not. How often is it really damaging to them? How often are classes about discussion about differences and cultural education? I learned more about the power of meditation and stress-relief through attending religious ceremonies than at any of the professional development days run by over-enthusiastic, quasi mental-health experts.

I've also learned through writing my Master's thesis on paranormal beliefs that the likelihood of removing supernatural beliefs through education is an empirical question that isn't resolved. Many of the supernatural beliefs held by friends, students, fellow staff and community members, during that time and since, just aren't religiously based. Many were entirely personal and often brought them into direct conflict with the teachings of their church. Individual differences aren't hardwired or merely due to indoctrination — they become so implicitly tied in with personal experiences and the influence of their culture that it becomes a part of your identity.

I'd say that the majority of teachers are dedicated to mainstream educational needs first and foremost and not indoctrination or propaganda. More often than not, educators put aside their religious beliefs to discuss vital social needs. Are God-fearing narratives really that convincing, after acknowledging the influences of the outside world upon young, modern minds?

I wonder sometimes if this will be the future of the educational institutions that I work at: crawling to a stop in the face of technologically-savvy young people who share everything from copies of Dawkins The God Delusion to Tim Minchin comedy routines.

After more of a decade of seeing fundamentalism destroy communities, create wars and actively target the young people we worked to educate as literate and questioning citizens of the twenty-first century, will the 'quiet word' about 'don't go too far' in promoting one's religion be the final nail? Maybe it is more complicated than that - but then, I've always had a different kind of faith about things.

Kylie Sturgess is a blogger, Token Skeptic podcaster, was one of the MCs at the Global Atheist convention and works as a Philosophy teacher in Western Australia. The following is adapted from the forthcoming Australian Book Of Atheism, edited by Warren Bonnet.

Ed gets measured; Novel win for humour; Thames turns tide; Dun Roman; Slipway into history; Art falls on stony rules

The BBC is hacking away at itself, in a desperate bid to stave off the threat of imposed cuts. Senior management is so far taking the brunt of the pain, as director-general Mark Thompson makes good his promise to cut 25% of the Corporation's top jobs by the end of 2012.

Among the latest to go are Sharon Bayley, hired in May last year as director of "marketing, communications and audience". The £310,000 ($490,000) post, whatever it means, will remain vacant. Two Corporation board members, Peter Salmon and Lucy Adams, are also being dropped. Salmon heads BBC North, but angered fellow managers when he said this summer that he would not move to Salford when the Corporation opens its new head office there next month. Adams was paid £320,000 to be the BBC's director of people or, in plain English, personnel manager.

The good times in broadcasting have not quite stopped rolling. Those being culled from the senior ranks will have handsome payoffs. And there are plenty of eager beavers willing to take their place. One such is Danny Cohen who has been appointed controller of BBC1, the Corporation's flagship television channel, at the ripe young age of 36. He will be paid £260,000 a year to oversee an annual budget of £1.13bn.

The BBC is anxious to rid itself of a fat-cat image in the midst of savage public-spending cuts. It is also keenly aware that many Conservatives loathe the very idea of public-service broadcasting, and believe the Corporation to be staffed entirely by mad lefties.

Ed gets measured

Of the many agonies of being leader of the opposition, prime minister's questions is the second-worst. (The first, of course, is not being prime minister). Ed Miliband, the new leader of the Labour party, had his first PMQs last week and, to the surprise of many parliament-watchers, he made rather a good fist of it.

The actual questions and answers were of the usual yah-boo-sucks sort, dripping with sarcasm and larded with soundbytes for the telly. But – and this is the important thing – Miliband made David Cameron sound shrill and petulant, while he himself came over as measured, even statesmanlike. He even turned one of Cameron's better rhetorical remarks to his own advantage. "I may be new to this game," he said, "but I think that I ask the questions and he gives the answers."

Labour backbenchers, most of whom had voted for David Miliband to be party leader, were delighted with his little brother's performance. Their resounding cheers must have been music in the ears of the man who would be prime minister.

Novel win for humour

Another delighted debutante last week was Howard Jacobson, who has at long last won the Man Booker prize for his novel The Finkler Question. The announcement stunned the literary world, for the book is a comedy, and the Man Booker judges are not noted for an excessive sense of humour.

Jacobson, on the other hand, is fully capable of laughing at himself. He's also quite good at eating his own words, declaring himself thrilled to have won a prize that he has often rudely derided. He said he would use the £50,000 award to buy his wife a handbag, asking: "Have you seen the price of handbags?"

Critics have noted that The Finkler Question might be a laugh-out-loud exploration of British Jewishness, but that it is also deeply serious. Sir Andrew Motion, the Booker award chairman, described it as "a very sad melancholic, book. It is comic, it is laughter, but it is laughter in the dark".

Thames turns tide

More than 50 years ago, the Thames was a chemical cocktail. It was biologically dead; a sad, filthy waterway choked with rubbish and human waste. Today, by almost magic comparison, the river is alive again. The Thames and its tributaries are home to 125 fish species alone, including salmon, trout, sole and bass.

The revived Thames has now been given a top worldwide conservation prize. The International Thiess river prize is awarded annually in Australia and comes with $346,000 to be spent on further restoration work.

More good riverine news: the otter, which was thought just 30 years ago to be on the brink of extinction, is making a strong comeback over most of the country except the extreme south-easterly county of Kent. The recovery is attributed to a 1970s ban on organo-chlorine pesticides, which used to pollute farmland run-off. Now our rivers, not only the Thames, are running clean again.

Dun Roman

For nearly 20 years, ever since the Church of England began to ordain women, there has been a steady trickle of high-church defectors to Roman Catholicism. In a phrase much used by the bells-and-smells tendency, they have gone home to Rome.

The simmering row over the ordination of women has intensified in recent years, as the debate moves on to the probability of female priests becoming bishops. Traditionalists who simply can't bear that idea have been further tempted to defect by Pope Benedict XVI's offer of a separate home within the Catholic church for Anglicans who want to continue practising some of their own traditional rites.

The arcane issues dividing Anglican and Roman Catholics have been highlighted with the decision by an entire C of E parish in Folkestone, Kent, to decamp to Rome en masse (so to speak). The congregation of St Peter's, who almost certainly must now worship elsewhere, is likely to be joined on the road to Rome by at least three Anglican bishops.

Slipway into history

A new Royal Navy warship has been launched into the River Clyde in Glasgow. Not much new there, you might think, and you'd be right. The Clyde has witnessed thousands of such launches, from piffling little cargo ships to giant ocean-going liners, as well as fighting vessels.

What was newsworthy about last week's slipway launch is that it was the last. In the future, if we build warships at all, they will be put together in dry docks and floated out, or else assembled like giant model kits. It won't seem the same.

Nor does the Navy's latest ship exactly echo the lean, rakish lines of earlier generations of Britain's Bulwarks, as they were once known. The type-45 anti-air destroyer is undeniably big at 7,100 tonnes, but its sternly angular, functional lines are likely to impress geeks more than romantics. At least its name evokes traditions: it will be called HMS Duncan, after the admiral who defeated a Dutch fleet at Camperdown in 1797.

Art falls on stony rules

The Tate Modern gallery doesn't do things by halves. The latest installation in its cavernous Turbine Hall consists of tiny handmade, handpainted ceramic sunflower seeds. A hundred million of them.

Conceived by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the idea was for visitors to walk through the exhibit, giving it a tactile as well as visual impact. It was immensely popular, and lasted all of two days before it was fenced off from the public. The reason? That old music-hall act, Health and Safety, feared that gallery-goers might breathe in tiny particles of ceramic dust and become ill.

So now the sea of seeds is unchurned by human feet. It lies still and tranquil and rather silly. Still, not so many seeds are being quietly pocketed by art lovers.

The educational landscape in Australia has changed remarkably over the last two decades. Expansions in the non-government school sector have been driven mostly by the establishment of new religious schools.

More than 1.1 million students out of a total student population of 3.4 million attend non-government schools in Australia. More than 90 per cent of these students are in religious schools.

As religious schools have become more numerous and more visible, they have also become more prominent in debates on education policy. The most contentious issue for the non-government sector generally has been public funding. However, with the emergence of religious schools that depart from the 'broad church' Western Judeo-Christian tradition, questions about the nature of these schools and their impact on society have come to the fore.

Concerns about religious schools fall into two main categories - the effects on the individual child and the effects on the broader society, with most of the commentary focusing on the potential for religious schools to undermine social cohesion by creating sectarian and cultural divisions. This is an important issue but much of the public debate about religious schools is based on assumption, speculation and misinformation.

For example, the Howard coalition government is commonly believed to have presided over unprecedented growth in non-government schools, but there were in fact two periods last century during which the rate of growth was higher than under the Howard government - the 1950s and the early part of the 1980s.

Rather, the defining change under the Howard government was the diversification of religious schools. Until the 1980s, close to 90 per cent of students in the non-government sector attended schools associated with the two major Christian denominations, Catholic and Anglican. In 2006, this proportion dropped to just over 70 per cent, with the remaining students attending schools affiliated with a large array of minority faiths.

The most substantive increases in enrolments have been in Islamic schools and new classifications of 'fundamentalist' Christian denominations. The number of children in these schools more than doubled in the period from 1998 to 2006.

Previously unpublished Census data show that the distribution of children from religious families across school sectors also changed markedly between 1996 and 2006. Some religious groups-particularly Jewish and Catholic-have had traditionally high rates of enrolment in non-government schools and this has changed little.

However, other religious groups increased their enrolments in the non-government sector significantly, almost entirely in independent schools. In 1996, 9 per cent of Muslim students attended independent schools, growing to 21 per cent in 2006. In 1996, 28 per cent of fundamentalist Christian students attended independent schools, increasing to 40 per cent in 2006.

The growth of religious schooling is even more remarkable in the context of declining religiosity in the population. The fastest growing category in Census data is 'no religion', weekly church attendance is falling and only a minority of couples these days choose to be married by clergy.

Furthermore, numerous parent surveys indicate that religion is usually not the most important factor in choice of school. It is outweighed by discipline, educational quality, and the school's capacity to develop their child's potential.

The fact that rising enrolments in religious schools has not been accompanied by an increased affinity with religion in the general population suggests that religious schools are not a strong indoctrinating force. Although good data is scarce, there is no evidence that attending a religious school increases religious commitment among students.

Nevertheless, concerns are often voiced about the social impact of the segregation of students into religious and sometimes culturally homogeneous schools.

It has been claimed that religious schools undermine social cohesion and tolerance of diversity, based on the assumption that contact increases tolerance. Research has provided ambiguous results, however, showing that simply attending school with people from different cultures and religions does not guarantee an appreciation of difference.

In addition, the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes finds that people who attended non-government schools do not express opinions that are less socially liberal or less tolerant of difference than people who attended government schools. On some issues, the opposite is the case.

Likewise, it cannot be shown that the increase in the number of enrolments and religious schools has exacerbated social tensions or created a sectarian divide. On the contrary, it can be argued that religious schools circumvent conflict by allowing free expression of different values and beliefs.

Multicultural societies have to attempt a difficult and delicate balancing act between social cohesion and pluralism. Differences must be respected but a stable, free society requires that some core values are preserved. All schools should have high levels of accountability, and no school should be allowed to educate students in a way that undermines a peaceful, harmonious society. At present there is no good reason to believe that religious schools are working against this goal.

Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and author of The Rise in Religious Schools which was published by the CIS.

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In Australia it's always easy to say 'The Government' should do something, whatever the issue. Unsurprisingly, the gay lobby has called on The Government to legalise homosexual marriage and, just as unsurprisingly, The Government, of whatever political persuasion, has refused. This will change however and gay marriage will be legalised well within our life times, by the same conservative forces that currently resist it.

For the record, I oppose gay marriage. I do so entirely because of the term, marriage. Like many, I have no objection to civil unions and to legal recognition of homosexual relationships. Marriage however, is a different thing. Marriage has, for thousands of years and across all major religions, been recognised as a sexual relationship between a man and a woman endorsed by God.

It did not start out that way. Marriage derives from the Latin term maritus, meaning husband or male lover, suggesting that the term originally meant to denote a contract involving the male and presumably his property and progeny. Marriage almost always endowed the male with property rights, including exclusive sexual access rights to the female.

It's clear from the history books that the various religions took their time developing marriage as a sacrament and probably began to do so in acknowledgment of the significance their communities and cultures placed upon it. No doubt the idea that the creation of human life was God-given helped encourage the notion of sacredness since marriage formally recognised children as the property of their father. For whatever reasons, marriage has been a religious rite for millennia.

Within the Christian world it was not until relatively recently that marriage became a matter for the state. During the Protestant Reformation of the 17th century state regulation was promoted to protect children from marriage and to outlaw incestuous unions to protect against in-breeding. Marriage laws, in Europe at least, were driven by the demands of religious reform movements from Martin Luther onwards.

The point of this history is that governments are very unwilling to change institutional arrangements with strong religious overtones without the support of religions themselves. They can work around them but will not challenge them directly if there is weak religious support or strong religious opposition. This applies in the secular age of today as much as it did when Henry The Eighth sat on the throne.

Similarly, governments are loathe to adopt new human rights legislation unless the changes are already accepted by the community. The Sex Discrimination Act of 1984 for example, was not made law until 20 years after the equal rights for women in the workplace movement began and access to contraception as well as the lobby against domestic violence were well established. In that sense, the law was and remains a conservative animal, essentially ratifying what is already majority opinion. The role of the churches, incidentally, was critical in this and extensive accommodation of their views and interests was incorporated into the many exemptions within sex discrimination law. Australia, despite its public hedonism, is a religious country.

So in my view we will not see an Australian government amend the Marriage Act to allow for marriage between two people of the same sex until the churches call out for it. You might laugh, given the staunch opposition of both Anglican and Catholic churches. But as the Reformation demonstrates, churches fracture, split and finally break away. Either religious reformers emerge who take others with them or the existing churches will seek confrontation and force them out as is currently occurring within the Anglican church. However it happens once new religious denominations which are prepared to marry homosexual couples prosper and grow there will be a very powerful pressure group working to change the marriage laws that governments will find much harder to resist.

If the gay lobby wants gay marriage, it should start with the churches. Australian governments will follow.

Pru Goward is the state Liberal member for Goulburn in the NSW Parliament, shadow minister for women and community services.

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By Daniel Burke
Religion News Service

(RNS) Contrary to what they say about Las Vegas, what happens in one branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion rarely stays there.

And no one knows this more than the former Episcopal bishop of Sin City, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who is now presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.

Jefferts Schori recently wrapped up a whirlwind tour of six Anglican provinces--all of them English-speaking--where she defended her church's acceptance of gay bishops and same-sex unions, and its commitment to maintaining ties with other provinces.

In June and July, Jefferts Schori traveled to Canada, Scotland, England, Australia, New Zealand and Wales, addressing synods, preaching at cathedrals, sitting on panels, talking with parishioners, and meeting with powerful archbishops.

At almost every stop, the presiding bishop's message was subtle but clear: her church's embrace of gays and lesbians is grounded in the gospel, and the Anglican Communion has always allowed local autonomy in its provinces.

Jefferts Schori and her staff say the visits abroad were planned well before the controversy that followed the May 15 consecration of Bishop Mary Douglas Glasspool in Los Angeles, the second openly gay bishop in the 2.1 million-member Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of Anglicanism.

Still, her timing could not have been more fortuitous. In the weeks before a top Anglican committee decided whether to punish the Episcopal Church for ignoring warnings not to consecrate Glasspool, Jefferts Schori visited the homelands--and sometimes home churches--of five of the committee's 13 members.

(Jefferts Schori herself and another U.S. bishop hold seats on the panel, the Anglican Communion Standing Committee.)

On July 24, the panel firmly rejected a proposal to "separate" the Episcopal Church from the rest of the communion, calling the move premature and "unhelpful."

In a recent webcast, Jefferts Schori was asked if she was trying to shore up support from other provinces before the meeting. "That was certainly not the intent," she answered. "It may have been a byproduct."

"We have partners all across the Anglican Communion," Jefferts Schori continued. "These visits had been set up some time ago, well before the timing of the Standing Committee meeting was known, basically as a way of building relationships between our respective provinces."

Neva Rae Fox, a spokeswoman for the Episcopal Church, said Jefferts Schori was not available for further comment on her travels.

The visits come in the wake of a war of words between Jefferts Schori and Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual leader of the communion, over whether inter-Anglican conflicts over homosexuality should be settled by centralizing authority in the hands of a few powerful bishops and committees.

Jim Naughton, a progressive blogger at Episcopal Cafe, said Jefferts Schori's international diplomacy is necessary to counter conservatives who have labeled Episcopalians as heretics and want them ousted from the communion.

"Something like this was long overdue," he said. "One thing people underestimate is the effect of a constant drumbeat of vilification on the morale of the church. The Episcopal Church has an organized opposition that would be very happy to replace it or destroy it. They put an image of the presiding bishop and the Episcopal Church out there, and if we do not engage with that, that's the image that takes hold."

But the Rev. Kendall Harmon, a conservative theologian from South Carolina, criticized what he called Jefferts Schori's "charm offensive."

"The clear implication of her message is that the American church is way out ahead, but fortunately it will wait for the rest of the communion to catch up," Harmon said.

While Jefferts Schori said she was "received very well," there were some diplomatic snafus. Williams' office asked her not to wear her miter, a pointy hat that symbolizes her rank as a bishop, while preaching at London's Southwark Cathedral. The presiding bishop called the request "beyond bizarre."

Also, at a panel in England, Archbishop Thabo Makgoba of Cape Town, South Africa, chided Episcopalians for acting "in ways that communicated a lack of care about the consequences of their actions."

In Sydney, the Anglican Church League, an evangelical group, said Jefferts Schori bears "a great deal of responsibility" for the "division and anguish" in the communion.

"It is entirely inappropriate that she should be welcomed into any diocese in the Anglican Church of Australia," the Rev. Mark Thompson, the league's president, said in a statement.

And Anglicans in New Zealand kept her visit "low key," according to a local media report, not allowing her to appear at a prominent cathedral.

"Nobody makes any bones about the fact that she does represent tension," Lloyd Ashton, a spokesman for the Anglican church in New Zealand, told The Press, a local newspaper.

"There is not going to be an endorsement of where the Episcopalian (sic) Church is going," Ashton said.

AUSTRALIA'S leading church group has called on Australian churches and the public to boycott Israeli goods made in occupied Palestinian territories.

The National Council of Churches in Australia - which includes the Catholic, Anglican, Uniting and Orthodox churches among its members - passed the resolution last month.

New Prime Minister Julia Gillard assured Australia's Christian majority on Thursday that her atheism would not affect government funding to church-run schools if she is re-elected.

When, in March 2009, the then Bishop of Rochester, the Rt, Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali resigned as a Bishop amidst death threats from Muslim extremists in the UK it was a total victory for Islamism. And we allow this to continue day in day out when we – by government decree, it would seem, almost – we kowtow to the Islamists at so many occasions.

I only heard recently of this great loss not only to the Anglican Communion in Britain and worldwide but to the British society as a whole. Bishop Nazir-Ali was never afraid to speak his mind, until Muslim extremists threatened his family.

The feasts of Christmas and of Easter could offend them so it is now Happy Holidays and Happy Spring Festival. That is how far we have come in this country and how far we have been emasculated by those that are not even real and true Muslims but an abomination on the eyes of Allah.

The loss of, if only by resignation, of the Rt, Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, means that the Anglican and Catholic Churches in Britain no longer have a single bishop who grasps the extent of the threat of Islam to civil society.

One may not have always agreed with Bishop Nazir-Ali on all grounds, but he was the only Bishop who not only understands the true incompatibility of Sharia law with our ancient common law, but also followed in great detail the incremental changes to the public sector in order to accommodate Islamic religious demands.

Bishop Nazir-Ali was the only Church of England bishop who understood the full implications of domestic Sharia was also the only one properly alarmed by it. Nor is it surprising that he found it impossible to exercise his office under the leadership of an Archbishop of Canterbury who, shamefully, wishes to afford greater state recognition to Sharia.

How depressing. But the Muslim Council of Britain will be pleased, that’s for sure.

We, the people of this country, must stand up and demand from our elected politicians, if they have any balls – and here the women are as much called upon as those that supposedly have the proverbial ones – that they stand up to the demands of the Muslims and point out to them, as did the former Prime-Minister of Australia, John Howard, who told them what is what in no uncertain terms.

The same as what PM Howard of Australia said then also applied to the UK. This country was founded on Christian principles and the Muslims came here as guests and refugees and even though some may have been born here that still makes no difference.

Britain is a Christian country, to all intents and purposes, and that's how we like to leave it.

If you want to live under Sharia Law then I am sure someone in this country, if you do not have the funds, would be happy to pay your fare to go to such a country where Sharia Law is practiced.

On the other hand, if you want to remain in Britain then you accept our ways and that is it, period.

You have the freedom to practice your religion, in the same way as Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and others have, as long as its practices do not fall foul of the laws of the country. If they do then the law of the realm applies and not some religious law, period.

Your choice. And it is the British people's choice as to whether they want further encroachment of Muslim laws and such into our common law society.

© 2010

Chris Sudgen of Anglican Mainstream shared this morning on email:

"The Global South Communique speaks of the Global South being "the vast majority of the active membership of the Anglican Communion". A review of the statistics available would bear this out and gives a percentage of about 80 percent.

On the Anglican Communion Office website the number is given as 80 million. This cannot be the case given a proper understanding of the figures for the Church of England. Of these 80 million, 26 million are reckoned to be with the Church of England. The Church of England official statistics gives the total attendance for all ages on Christmas Eve / Christmas Day 2008 as 2.6 million. ( see http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/statistics/) So the real total for the Anglican Communion needs to be reduced by at least 20 million."

Read on for numbers in the global south:

Nigeria   20 million

Uganda     8,782,821   2002 Census

Kenya        5,000,000   ACK website

Southern Africa 3 million to 4 million   ACSA website Say 3.5 million

Church of South India 3.8 million   Wikipedia

Church of North India 1,250,000    Wikipedia

Tanzania   2,5 million Wikipedia

Rwanda   1 million

West Africa 1 million

West Indies 770,000 Lambeth Directory 1998

Pakistan   800,000 Wikipedia and Lambeth Directory 1998

Indian Ocean 120,000 Anglican Communion website

Burundi 425,000 Lambeth Directory

Central Africa 600,000 Lambeth Directory

Congo   300,000 Lambeth Directory

Myanmar 49,000 Lambeth Directory

South East Asia 98,000 Wikipedia

Jerusalem and Middle East 10,000

The total of the above is 50,004,821

The totals for other provinces are

Australia 3,903,324 (Anglican Communion Website)

New Zealand   584,793 (Anglican Communion website)

CofE 2.6 million (Cof E statistics)

USA 2,285,000 worldwide   Wikipedia

Canada   2,035,500    Wikipedia

Ireland 410,000    Lambeth Directory

Scotland 53,000     Lambeth Directory

Total 11,871,617

Combined totals   61,876,438

As a percentage the Global South is 80 per cent.

Child abuse by German cleric among claims causing crisis for Vatican

For Father Rupert Frania it seemed the best way. His parishioners in the Bavarian spa town of Bad Tölz had just learned a terrible secret.

It had been reported that one of their curates was a convicted paedophile, Peter Hullermann. The curate who had officiated at the children's mass. The one who had been with their sons and daughters the year before at a campsite in the mountains over their medieval town.

Frania decided to tackle the issue from an angle. In his sermon at the main mass last Sunday morning, he began with the parable of the prodigal son – and was stopped dead in mid-sentence.

"I cannot listen to that," shouted a man who was soon to have been married by Hullerman. "You just cannot dodge the issue any longer," he continued as other parishioners broke into applause and some began shouting "shut your mouth" at their parish priest.

It was a raucously rebellious start to a week in which the disclosure of hundreds of cases of alleged clerical sex abuse in the Roman Catholic church's European heartlands shook the allegiances of millions and forced their pastors to make unprecedented admissions of guilt and mortification.

In Armagh on St Patrick's Day the primate of All Ireland, Sean Brady, told the congregation in his cathedral that the clergy should admit "the full truth of our sinfulness".

Brady, who in 1975 was involved in the swearing to silence of two young victims of Ireland's most notorious clerical paedophile, was one of scores of prelates bowing their heads in disgrace in the Netherlands, Austria, Germany and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland and Italy.

So far almost 700 new cases have come to light. It was a week of unmitigated calamity for Benedict XVI, who became pope pledging to shore up Christianity in an increasingly secular Europe.

"It is such a big story because everything about it is extreme," says the religious affairs author and journalist Clifford Longley. "It is the worst crisis for the Vatican since the middle ages."

Longley believes the Catholic church is embedded in European history like nothing else. "It claims divine foundation. The pope's title of Vicar of Christ means he still claims to represent supernatural power. It has been loved and hated, with passion and sometimes loathing. It dominated the middle ages, launched the Crusades, triggered the Reformation; the Enlightenment was a direct reaction against it."

The topic of child sexual abuse provokes strong emotions, even more so when people learn of the steps taken to conceal it. Nowhere has this veil of secrecy been lifted higher than in the Irish Republic, the focus of three reports since 1994.

At the start of the millennium the Catholic church in England and Wales commissioned Lord Nolan to investigate priestly abuse. It resulted in measures to improve child protection policies and reporting procedures, but did little or nothing to address or repair the damage of past abuse.

The 2007 Cumberlege commission reviewed the church response to the Nolan report, but only two of its 72 recommendations dealt specifically with historic cases. This oversight is something support groups are all too aware of and there are demands for a UK inquiry.

Graham Wilmer, who runs the Lantern Project which has helped hundreds of sexual abuse victims since 2003, said: "The psychological and emotional damage has affected them throughout their lives. Until they made contact with us, they have had little if any help in dealing with the aftermath."

Wilmer was sexually abused by a teacher at a Catholic school and spent years trying to bring his tormentor to justice. He wants the British government to establish a truth and reconciliation commission to address the issue.

Longley says the scandal "brings into contrast the priest as man of God, symbol of purity and holiness and the sexual abuse of children as the ultimate betrayal of innocence, representing unspeakable evil. And conspiracy in high places to hide the scandal. No novelist could have invented such a plot."

In spite of earning outright condemnation for its clumsy attempts to sweep matters under the carpet, the church will probably overcome these difficult times. Unlike the Anglican Communion, which buckles under the weight of polarised opinion on homosexuality, the Catholic church always emerges, not entirely unscathed, from adversity.

Longley says the church survived nazism, fascism and communism and will outlast the EU, the UN, the US. "Bad though this crisis is, it has survived much worse. At the start of the 16th century the Vatican was little better than a shit-hole."

The question remains why this situation should be judged so grave when the numbers involved are smaller than in the US, where a 2004 report found evidence in support of almost 7,000 allegations.

One possible answer is the cumulative effect of abuse in so many countries. The crisis has spread from the US to Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and now the German-speaking heart of Europe. Not the least of the difficulties is financial. The church has already had to find some $5bn (£3.3bn) in compensation and now faces the prospect of having to fund more compensation, settlements and legal fees at the same time as disgusted Catholics stop their contributions.

Giancarlo Galli, the Italian author of Finanza Bianca, a study of the Vatican's finances, said: "There is nothing less transparent than the accounts of the church. It is known that with all the troubles in the US, the church was very much looking north, across the Alps, and above all to Bavaria, for support."

It has even been suggested that some of the cardinals who elected the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as pope cast their votes with one eye on the material benefits of having a German pontiff.

This is scarcely the first crisis involving what an Australian victims' group, Broken Rites, has termed black-collar crime. But never before has a scandal cast doubts on the judgment and authority of a pope.

So far the debate has focused on his role in the Peter Hullermann affair. Hullermann was transferred to the Munich diocese when Ratzinger was archbishop, ostensibly for therapy. Though known to be a paedophile, he was moved to a parish where he was convicted of abusing another child.

Christian Weisner, the spokesman for the lay movement, Wir sind Kirche, said that in Munich: "People are asking: 'What did [Benedict] know? What did he do?'" Many Catholics in Bavaria and elsewhere were ready to accept the diocese's version – that the decision to reassign Hullerman was made by Ratzinger's deputy. But Weisner added: "The pope is asking for transparency. So he too should be transparent and ask his successor to open the archives for people to see exactly what happened."

The issue of Benedict's responsibility goes far beyond Munich to encompass his subsequent role as pope.

Weisner argues that this pope "learned more about clerical sex abuse than any other bishop or cardinal and has done more to fight it than any other cardinal or pope".

But there is a sharp distinction between his attitude while a cardinal and his activities as pope that could yet leave an indelible stain on the reign of Benedict XVI.

In 2005 he was elected days after declaring that the time had come to sweep "the filth" from his church. By then he had read – and was disgusted by – files on more than 3,000 clerical abuse cases that were channelled to his department by a decree issued four years earlier by John Paul II.

Most of the cases dealt with by the Vatican department in recent years resulted in the accused being removed, if not defrocked.

The problem for Benedict is that, as in many other theological respects, he changed his mind. The US Vatican-watcher John Allen this week published in National Catholic Reporter an extract from the transcript of a conference in Spain that showed that, as late as November 2002, Ratzinger dismissed the American abuse scandals as the result of a "planned campaign" in the media.

By 2002 the then cardinal had signed what critics claim was an incitement to the obstruction of justice. A letter he circulated to bishops the previous year reminded them that internal church inquiries into certain serious offences were covered by what is known as papal secrecy, for which the penalty is excommunication.

"The question is whether Ratzinger's past may trump Benedict's present," wrote Allen.

The nuns who have traditionally made communion wafers are threatened by Polish, and, worse, American competition

The Roman Catholic church does not approve of untramelled globalisation so an international trade in communion wafers should not be threatening the livelihood of French convents. Yet it is. Nearly sixty contemplative houses in France are feeling their livelihoods threatened by falling demand for the wafers that the make. Not only is the number of Catholics in France falling, but their product is undercut by cheap imports from Poland, which come from a secular factory. Bad enough that the French were threatened by "The Polish plumber"; the Polish wafer is an even more serious attack on the tranquil heart of France.

For the moment the danger has been averted after the nuns publicised a threat by the shrine at Lourdes to switch to the Polish wafer. But in the long run, this little industry may be threatened like every other part of traditional French agriculture. In vain the charming little websites showing in detail how the wafers are made. One convent explains themselves: "We know we are useless in the eyes of many in a world shaped by the pursuit of profit and of efficiency, but our happiness is rooted in a love freely given" and it's a shame to think of these 18 sisters outside Avignon forced to find some other way to earn a living. But in the wider world, the change has already happened.

At Christmas, the New York Times ran a remarkable story about a Rhode Island bakery which has captured 80% of the market for communion wafers in the US, Canada, and even here and Australia. The Cavanagh company's wafers are truly ecumenical. They are praised by Anglicans, Lutherans and Methodists as well as Roman Catholics. They can be snapped theatrically without crumbs. And 850m of them were sold last year. The cunning thing, though, is their marketing strategy: in Catholic dioceses, they sell to monasteries and convents, which then sell them on to the churches, keeping an income without the industry. I do not think St Benedict would have approved. His rule established that monks should spend a third of their waking hours in prayer, a third in study, and a third in manual labour. The hard work of baking was part of its attraction.

In this country, the manufacture of Catholic communion hosts is largely the responsibility of the contemplative orders. Some of the convents here are already selling on the Polish wafers, according to Sister Mary Bernadette, who has the improbable job of press officer for the Association of British Contemplatives. And this is probably the least inflammatory solution to the French crisis. If it were discovered that an American firm were muscling into the supply of French communion wafers, the riots against McDonalds would look like a tea party in a convent of contemplatives.

An email from an Anglican 'flying bishop' to a Catholic bishop in Australia sheds light on the machinations of the Anglo-Catholics

An extraordinary correspondence has fallen into my hands showing some of the detail of the Anglo-Catholic intrigues about their departure from the Church of England. It shows the Anglican "flying bishop" of Ebbsfleet, Andrew Burnham, conspiring with a sympathetic Roman Catholic bishop in Australia to work behind the back of the Catholic bishops here. He talks about his "cloak and dagger" correspondence with a sympathiser in the Vatican, and suggests that he can write personally to Pope Benedict XVI to smooth things over if his correspondent is caught. This may come as news to the pope.

The Australian bishop, Peter Elliott, is himself an Anglican convert, and is in charge of the pope's outreach to Anglican opponents of women priests in Australia. Most of these are grouped in a body called the Traditional Anglican Communion, which claims to have half a million members world wide: Burnham warns Bishop Elliott against complete confidence in their leader, Archbishop Hepworth ("clearly a charming man … but not everything he says … synchronises fully with what we know from other sources").

But the passage which will cause discomfort in this country is this:

"I am taking the liberty of mentioning, in confidence and with his permission, that we are in touch with Mgr Patrick Burke at the CDF [the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith]. It has all felt a little bit like Elizabethan espionage but, truly, the informal contact with the CDF has been invaluable, and, if ever Mgr Burke got into trouble, I should write to the pope and say how splendidly helpful he has been. 

This is not known about fully in England and Wales because we are trying to ensure that the whole Anglicanorum Coetibus project, which will begin in small ways, is not smothered by the management anxieties of a hierarchy, some of whom think that Anglicans are best off doing what they are presently doing and some of whom think the project would impact adversely on the Catholic Church in England. Needless to say Fr Pat's help, and the support of Archbishop DiNoia, need, to a lesser extent, to be protected from disapproval at higher levels of the dicastery [Vatican department]. Hence the cloak and dagger."

Anglicanorum Coetibus is the pope's plan to allow disaffected Anglicans to convert as a group, and to keep their own bishops. As Bishop Burnham says, the Catholic hierarchy in this country is not enthusiastic about the prospect. The plan was sprung on Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the head of the Catholic church in England and Wales, with very little notice and although attention at the time was concentrated on the obvious discomfort of Rowan Williams, the Catholic archbishop had known no more than him.

It's still not clear how much autonomy the Anglican "ordinariates" will have; but Bishop Elliott told an Australian audience they would be comparable to the Eastern churches in communion with Rome; the Maronite Christians of the Lebanon, and the formerly orthodox "Uniate" churches of the Ukraine. "The structure ... is much closer to an Eastern Rite Church in its autonomy than some might imagine."

This kind of autonomy, a church within the church, has long been the dream of the former Anglicans who converted in the early 70s. But it is not what the Catholic hierarchy thinks it is getting in this country. Monsignor Andrew Faley, the assistant secretary to the Bishops' conference here, said "He's wrong – he's not entirely right, would be more ecclesially correct ... Uniate status is concerned with rite; but the Anglican liturgy is so close to ours that it's not possible in this case. The Pope asked our bishops to 'be generous' and in asking this was recognising their generosity to be genuine. Their hospitality to former Anglicans is 100% assured and the authority of the Church in working this out rests with the bishops' conferences and not with the CDF."

But no groups have yet actually approached the Roman Catholic authorities in this country, according to Mgr Faley.

The other intriguing admission in Bishop Burnham's letter is that "the project … will start in small ways". This suggests that enthusiasm for the ordinariates is still much greater among the priests and bishops who hope to lead it than among the ordinary Anglicans who are supposed to follow them and fill its churches.

• In a piece about tensions over oil exploration – Envious eyes in Argentina as Falkland Islanders gear up for an oil bonanza, 8 February, page 9 – BHP Billiton was described as a British company when it is Australian. And in a list of countries claiming waters farther to the south, an accompanying panel (Argentina's claim) mistakenly included China and Russia, though the latter has reserved the right to make a future claim.

• A story reported Rowan Williams's appeal for Anglicans to show mutual tolerance over issues of gay equality and female bishops. The story also noted a statement put out by the head of the church in Uganda, Henry Orombi, supporting his country's proposed anti-gay legislation. Contrary to our headline – Archbishop's plea for tolerance undermined by attack on gay people at General Synod, 10 February, page 4 – the Orombi statement was issued in Kampala. The statement also insisted: "The church is a safe place for individuals to seek help and healing." This was changed in editing to "Williams's church", when the Ugandan archbishop was referring to his own.

• For readers who questioned the absence of Finland's president from a map showing female world leaders, a clarification: the map sought to show only those whose office makes them the operational government leader – whether as president, prime minister or chancellor (So that makes how many? 10 February, page 3, G2).

• Near homophone corner: My (very) brief career as a Michelin stared chef (9 February, page 1).

• Even nearer homophone corner: Critic's picks, 8 February, page 36: Sweat Charity.

Week one: chance

How can a novel be true to chance? Novels aspire to be level with life, but the sense of pattern that all good ­narrative provides can seem un­lifelike. ­Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda is a beautifully managed narrative, but one that respects accident. Partly this is by having leading characters who are themselves fascinated by chance. Oscar, brought up in mid-19th-century Devon by his loving but utterly inflexible father, a leading member of a fundamentalist Christian sect, believes that happenstance is in fact providence. God must be behind all chance events. By a private process of divination, casting a stone on to a lettered grid, he perceives that his father's faith is false, and that he should desert him for the household of the local Anglican vicar. Every day the boy throws lots under "the terrible pressure of eternity".

Later, as an odd, solitary student at Oxford, he is accidentally chosen as a gambling companion by the roguish Wardley-Fish, who knocks on his door mistaking it for the college room of another undergraduate. He needs a companion for the races, and Oscar's fate is sealed by the error. For, being a connoisseur of the pattern beneath apparent randomness, Oscar, whom Wardley-Fish supposes an innocent abroad, has a peculiar gift for gambling. Naturally, at Newmarket and Newbury, Catterick and Sandown Park, he sees "God's hand everywhere about". Meanwhile, over in Australia, Lucinda, a young lady with feminist sympathies and a large inheritance, is also becoming addicted to gambling. When she visits London, her mother's friend George Eliot complains that when George Lewes takes Lucinda out for tea, she attempts "to seduce him into a game of chance".

Oscar and Lucinda, being a love story, has a pattern implied in its title. The two eponymous characters grow up, in the novel's early chapters, thousands of miles apart, but are destined to be brought together. Carey sharpens our curiosity about how this will be managed by keeping them separate for almost half the book (they speak to each other for the first time on page 231 of my 520-page edition). Groups of chapters alternate between England and Australia as, we suppose, the paths of Oscar and Lucinda move to some unlikely intersection. Chance does the trick. Oscar, now a clergyman, embarks on a mission to bring Christianity to Australia. (Naturally his decision to go is made by tossing a penny, which comes up heads: "you did not need to be a mind-reader to know that God was sending him to New South Wales"). Lucinda is on the same ship because, having visited London more or less in search of a husband, she has given up hope and decided to return. Religion is their ostensible bond: Lucinda seeks Oscar to hear her confession. But in fact it is gambling. In Lucinda's cabin the two experience a kind of ecstasy, playing poker together for penny bets. All is delicious, concentrated stillness, the previously twitchy Oscar, Lucinda observes, "all strapped down like ­Ulysses at the mast".

The novel's dénouement will eventually be brought about by a wager, when Oscar, determined to prove his love, bets Lucinda that he can transport a glass church to the outback and erect it on her behalf. The stake is her whole fortune – and implicitly her hand in marriage. Gambling and religion are made inextricable as a way to get to the workings of chance. It is hard to think of a novel so rich in ­theological schism and argument. Its characters readily identify each other as ­Evangelicals and Puseyites, Rechabites and Latitudinarians. Their varieties of belief are anxiously dogmatic. "Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier," Oscar tells Lucinda, "we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it . . . We must gamble every instant of our allotted span". Religion in the novel is not absurd. Narratively it answers the characters' needs to find something better than randomness. The two protagonists of Oscar and Lucinda struggle to make the flukes of their lives into patterns.

The very form of Carey's novel seems to make chance visible. It is composed of 111 short chapters, often digressing and including the back-stories of a crowd of minor characters. Every little chapter is a self-contained episode, each one a testimony to luck. There is also its framing device, for the novel is narrated by someone ­revealing his own genealogy. We know from its first paragraph that "the ­Reverend Oscar Hopkins (1841-66)" is "my great-grandfather" (and if we look at those dates we might guess at some impending mischance). What is the strangest instance of chance that a person can think of but the chance that brought his or her parents together?

"In order that I exist," says Carey's nameless narrator, "two gamblers, one Obsessive, the other Compulsive, must meet". Lucinda follows a path to Oscar "as complex as that of a stainless steel Pachinko ball". But near the end of the novel we realise that the chance occurrence to which we have always been heading is not what we ­expected: the narrator owes his ­existence to an accident that will surprise the cleverest novel reader. The greatest novel in English dedicated to the consequences of chance events, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, is similarly a long story of how its narrator's conception came about. Carey wonderfully reanimates this ­narrative mission.

John Mullan is professor of English at University College London.

How this troubled corner of the Himalayas has gone from war zone to ultimate ski destination

Wow, life really can be a bummer. It's 14 January and I'm sitting on the Heathrow Express, reading in the paper that Scotland is buried under snow, its ski resorts rejoicing in the best conditions for a decade. Meanwhile, Scandinavia has epic amounts of powder, the Alps are having a superb month and there's so much of the white stuff in London that people are skiing on Hampstead Heath. And this is the year I choose to go all the way to India, to ski in the Himalayas where, for the first time in 15 years, there's no snow.

Well almost none. At the airport Jon, the photographer, fills me in on the grim situation. Bizarre as it seems, the Highlands' gain seems to have been the Himalayas' loss – the same dominant northerly weather system that brought the Arctic cold to Britain has meant India's peaks have been getting dry north winds from across parched expanses of Russia and the 'Stans, instead of wet snow-packed clouds from the Arabian Sea. I succeed in being philosophical about this for about eight minutes, then drown my sorrows courtesy of Qatar Airways to such an extent that the inflight showing of Gavin & Stacey has me sobbing my eyes out.

Twenty hours later, I emerge from Srinagar airport, blinking in the bright sunshine. Even without the hangover, the scene would be surreal. Before me is a huge billboard that says "Welcome to Kashmir, Paradise on Earth" above a scene of lakes and snow-capped mountains so pretty it would have you humming jolly ditties about lonely goatherds, were it not for the fact that beneath the poster is a machine gun emplacement, from which Indian army commandos peer through camouflage netting. More soldiers are on patrol outside the arrivals hall, toting machine guns and looking on as our group, a dozen skiers in bright puffa jackets, sunglasses and luminous bobble hats, wander out and start to hoist skis onto the roofs of taxis.

It's a sight the soldiers are getting increasingly used to. A couple of years ago stories about Kashmir started to spread through the ski bars of the Alps, rumours of a powder paradise, where a metre of fresh, light snow falls like clockwork every week throughout the winter. And could there be a more compelling subject for a traveller's tale? Kashmir has been romanticised by everyone from the 16th-century Mogul emperor Jahangir (who, when asked on his deathbed if he wanted anything, whispered "Kashmir, only Kashmir") to Salman Rushdie (who spoke of "the lush valleys, the lakes, the streams, the saffron meadows – the intense physical beauty and culture of enormous harmony") and Led Zepellin ("Ooh my baby, let me take you there").

Add the spice of danger, the years of violent border disputes between India and Pakistan that have kept it off limits, and you have the delicious prospect of a beautiful forbidden valley at the edge of the world's highest mountains. Compare that with the familiar, never-changing Alpine round of chalets and fondues, lift queues and après-ski, and it's little surprise that keen skiers weary of St Anton and Val d'Isère are making the long pilgrimage here.

Our procession of jeeps with skis and snowboards piled on the roofs leaves the airport through multiple army checkpoints, swerving around barbed wire-encrusted barricades and then heads out through the dusty, grey, dirt-poor villages. We feel like some over-privileged colonial-era hunting party, pursuing not big game but our prized powder snow.

An hour-and-a-half later we arrive at Gulmarg, India's leading ski resort, and the feeling of returning to the days of the Raj only intensifies. Sitting on a plateau at 2,600m, Gulmarg grew up as a hill station in the 19th century, when British civil servants and soldiers would come up to escape the summer heat, hunt and play golf. By the early 20th century there were three golf courses here, including one for women only, and in the middle of the fairways was St Mary's Anglican church, which still stands today.

"Here the happy fugitive from the sweltering heat of the lower regions will find a climate as glorious as the scenery – he can enjoy the best of polo and golf, picnics and scrambles on foot or on horseback, coming home to wind up the happy day with a cheery dinner and game of bridge," wrote one visitor, a Major TR Swinburne, in 1907.

We are staying at the Hotel Highlands Park, opened in 1966 by retired cavalry officer and golf fanatic Major Benjie Nedou. Though it is now owned by his granddaughter and her husband, who gave up legal and banking careers in London to return to Kashmir, Benjie would still feel very much at home. In the dining room hangs the bear that he shot after it attacked someone in the village, a sign by the lounge politely asks guests to leave weapons at the door, while the wood-panelled walls are covered in watercolours of St Andrews and plaques, medals and pendants presented by his friends in various Indian and British regiments (plus, strangely, one from Oldham Rotary Club).

Today, though, the lounge is filled with ski bums, not top brass. Around the fireplace there are dreadlocks, baseball caps, and big North Face down jackets. They're peering into laptops, poring over the latest weather forecasts. And no one is looking very happy.

Next morning I'm woken by a rustle in the bedroom. It's Ahmed and Mushtaq, who tiptoe in to leave a tray of sweet milky chai and stoke up the bukhari, the wood-burning stove in the corner of the room. The hotel is made up of several wooden cottages scattered along a ridge, each with a few rooms, and each with a couple of staff who are modelled on the army officer's batman, right down to the olive green and burgundy wool uniforms.

It's a brilliant morning and monkeys are playing on the grass terraces just beyond our verandah. To the right, above the forest, the summit of Mount Apharwat is sparkling in the early sun. Even Ahmed telling us that there is usually snow up to the eaves at this time of year, and that the hotel has to keep a team of five on round-the-clock shovelling duties to keep the paths clear, can't dent our spirits.

And so we're off to see Gulmarg's main claim to fame – its ski lifts. Well actually, its ski lift. Gulmarg has only one serious lift (the other three are tiny, ancient drag lifts for beginners). Building work for the main lift, the Gulmarg Gondola, began as far back as 1989, but after a major escalation in violence Gulmarg effectively shut down for almost a decade and construction was put on hold. The gondola was finally completed in 2005, taking skiers up to 3,979m, just below the summit of Apharwat, making it the world's highest ski lift. (There are two higher lifts in China but neither is in an ski resort, while higher lifts in Venezuela and Bolivia have shut down.)

The locals are, unsurprisingly, proud of this fact and around the resort are posters showing the lift with catchlines like "Gulmarg Gondola – a tryst with nature", "Gulmarg Gondola – a step closer to heaven", and "Gulmarg Gondola – a masterpiece of French engineering". The reality is a little less awe-inspiring. The gondola is French-built, made by lift company Poma, but given the 16-year construction period, it isn't what you'd call state of the art. As we queue up inside, the signs become more prosaic ("spitting or scratching inside the gondola is strictly prohibited") and a man scrambling in the machinery above our heads opens the doors of each cabin with a kick. The racks are too small for today's fatter skis, so we have to stick them half in, half out of the cabins, which means the doors can't close properly. The lift also breaks down regularly, doesn't open much before 10am, and won't run in high winds. We make a few nervous gags about it getting us a bit too close to heaven and decide not to think about it too much.

On the upside, it is cheap – 150 rupees (£2) up to the mid-station, 250 rupees to the top – and as we ride up, we can see there is some snow around. Nick Parks, our British guide, explains that so far in this freakish winter there have been only two snowfalls, one in November and one on New Year's Day, dropping a total of about 90cm. This is a monumental challenge to my positive mental attitude. On one hand we are going to be able to ski, it's sunny, we're in India, I haven't got ill yet and we've seen a monkey. On the other, there is less than half the snow here than they have in the Cairngorms!

Disembarking at the top station (which seems to be made largely from corrugated iron) we see our first, fabulous Himalayan panorama. Here, above the haze that hangs in the valley, we spin around to take in the chain of peaks that stretches around the horizon, from Pakistan into India and north to China, with Nanga Parbat, the world's ninth-highest peak, dominating the view.

We take a few runs, and though the snow is old and crusty rather than the fabled powder we've come searching for, we can quickly see the potential of the place. Apharwat is a big, wide, whale-backed mountain, with a dozen or so ridges coming off the front face at right angles, like the teeth of a comb. The top lift station is bang in the middle and so from it you can traverse left or right along the top, and choose to ride any of the ridges or drop into any of the bowls and gullies between them. Only a small central section is avalanche-controlled, patrolled and prepared; the rest of the mountain is off-piste. Glass half full: this is an amazing place, the perfect skiers' mountain, and in a normal year you could spend all week lapping the lift and riding every gully in a glorious frenzy of powder. Glass half empty: it's not a normal year.

Thankfully, Nick has a plan. At lunch in the Kongdori restaurant at the gondola mid-station (my first curry above 3,000m), he explains that instead of repeatedly taking the lift and skiing the front side of Apharwat, we'll head over the top and explore the back, looking for unskied routes, hunting out stashes of powder, and attaching sticky skins to our skis so we can climb up slopes and press out into the wilderness.

On day two we put the plan into action. From the lift we climb for 40 minutes to the summit of Apharwat, at 4,124m, ski down into a deserted valley, then trek up to another col, first on foot, clambering up through bushes, then on skis. From the top we can make out a strange, distant line in the snow, stretching away across every mountain we can see – the barricades that mark the start of the demilitarized zone before the "line of control", India and Pakistan's disputed border.

From here we begin our descent, first on open slopes, then into glades of paperbark trees, a type of pink-tinged birch. No one has been this way for at least three weeks – the snow is untouched, in places hard and icy, and in others deliciously powdery. Then the paperbarks start to blend into the forest of Himalayan pines, colossal trees shooting straight up for 30m or more. The trees are so old and tall they seem to suck up the sound as well as the light, and we dart through them shouting at each other so as not to get lost.

Then suddenly we pop out, back into the sunlight on an open slope which Nick calls Snow Leopard Couloir because of the animal's tracks he's seen in the snow there. (We never manage to spot one, but we do encounter its more common relative, the Himalayan Leopard – two of them skinned on the walls of the Highlands Park, one alive, seen by some of our group in the lights of a taxi at night.)

The snow in the couloir is a delight, turned sugary because it has sat untouched on the hill for so long, and we whoop as we ski down it, stopping occasionally to take photos, before we eventually reach a snow-covered road in a forgotten side valley. It's a military track off-limits to the public, used by soldiers heading for their border look-out posts. As we take off our skis to begin the hour-long walk back to town, there's a distant rumbling and a khaki truck lumbers around the corner, the three soldiers in the cab looking bemused at the skiers standing in the road before them. It's as if a wormhole has opened up between the frivolous slopes of Courchevel and this troubled corner of Asia, which Bill Clinton once dubbed "the most dangerous place in the world".

I'm not sure whether we should ignore them, run away or just smile, but Imtiyaz, a local who's come with us for the day, flags them down with a winning smile and pleads for a lift. The driver looks unsure, but then, with a wobble of the head, breaks into a huge smile, and we run round the back and clamber inside. We have done only one run in the whole day, but it's been more memorable than any day's skiing I've ever had.

"There's no polish here, this is a wild mountain," says Yaseen Khan, 54, owner of the Kashmir Alpine Ski Shop, a 12ft-square Aladdin's Cave that is the de facto hub of the resort. Inside it's dark but the walls are lined with ski gear, some ancient and battered hand-me-downs, others surprisingly new. In the back, Yaseen's son is repairing my skis by melting plastic onto them with a candle, while his father discusses how the resort's prospects have ebbed and flowed according to the intensity of India's border disputes with Pakistan and China, and the activity of Kashmir's insurgents and terrorists.

Now, after four years of relative calm, some are daring to dream about a new golden era for the resort. Plans for a second gondola are advanced, and a group of New Zealanders are planning to start a heli-skiing operation here next winter, catapulting Gulmarg into a new league, where the super-rich will pay more than €6,000 a week to avoid the temperamental gondola and the skinning uphill.

Yaseen is not keen. "If heliskiing comes it will be hell – far too much noise. People come here because it is so natural, so wild, and it should stay like that."

So is it safe? The Foreign Office says no, warning against travel to "rural areas" of Kashmir, and its website lists numerous clashes in Srinagar between protestors, insurgents and the police.

Of course, everywhere "feels" safe until you get into trouble, but it's hard to imagine much harm coming to a tourist in Gulmarg, high up on its secluded plateau. In fact, it is one of the most relaxed, convivial places I've ever been in India. There are no beggars, hawkers, or hassle. Indian and Western tourists mix, and the ski patrol and avalanche forecast team is a happy international blend of Canadians, Kiwis and Indians. Even the soldiers from the big army base on the edge of the village look like they are having fun, as they have their first faltering goes on the nursery slopes.

And so the week continues, in some ways like a normal ski holiday, in others totally different. The sunset stroll is accompanied by the call to prayer, we eat curry, not raclette, every night, we spot bear and leopard tracks in the snow, ski past monkeys and watch huge birds of prey circling. One afternoon, we ski down to find the village full of Indian tourists from Gujarat coming up to see snow for the first time. Dressed in rented fur coats, they sledge along the paths, screaming with glee, then make each of us pose with them for photographs. But the biggest difference, the strangest thing of all, is the sense of space, the lack of people. On this vast mountain, there are perhaps 50 skiers per day, and as we push out into distant corners of the range, we only ever catch glimpses of them.

"This is the worst year I have ever seen here, but, you know, it makes you change your rythym, adapt," says John Falkiner, a guide from Verbier who first came here in 1989. "Places like Chamonix and Verbier are getting ridiculous these days. There are so many people you just feel like another number.

"Here you get to know everyone else on the mountain – you'll probably play backgammon with them in the bar. It reminds me of growing up in Australia and going to the local ski club. It's not about ripping up as much powder as possible – the skiing is just the vehicle that lets us experience this exotic place."

And so we convince ourselves to stop yearning for snow, to forget about the long runs down to the valley-bottom villages of Drang and Babareshi that are impossible because of the snow drought, and we start to relish the trip. The group bonds, we relax, we take après-ski tea with Yaseen, chat with Ahmed and Mushtaq, and have the most interesting, unusual, fabulous ski trip. Perhaps the glass really is half full after all.

And then, literally as we get into the taxi to start the long journey back to Srinagar, Delhi and London, it starts to snow. Big, heavy, Himalayan snow flakes. Positive thinking flies out the window. Life really can be a bummer.

Charismatic Australian Anglican priest who was a huge influence on Tony Blair

Peter Thomson, who has died aged 73 of emphysema, was a "doer", a minister of the Anglican church of Australia with a very grounded view of religion. He had a talent for reading people like a book. For him, solving practical problems and making a difference to people's daily lives were a part of Christianity that talked about the word becoming flesh. This was the aim he pursued through his life in Australia, and for two periods in Britain, where he had a ­significant influence on Tony Blair. These came first when Blair was a ­student at Oxford – spellbound from their first encounter, according to his biographer John Rentoul – and later, when Blair was preparing to become the new Labour prime minister.

For Peter, faith was all about relationships: it had to be anchored in daily life and human action to have meaning. Geoff Gallop, a member of the same Oxford circle, who went on to become premier of Western Australia (2000-06), described Peter as a hard-drinking, hard-smoking Australian who spoke it as he saw it. Like Blair, the young Gallop established a ­relationship with the somewhat older Peter, a mature student in his mid-30s, that shaped his life, faith and politics.

When Peter arrived at St John's College, Oxford, in 1972, he bawled his eyes out for two days, missing his young family. However, friendships and loyalties grew quickly and stood the test of time. The students loved the outrageous things Peter said, while respecting their basis in theology and politics. Gallop recalls how Peter helped Blair bring together his half-formed thoughts, sharing with him the ideas of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, who, in his book The Self as Agent (1957), had proposed the formula: "All meaningful knowledge is for the sake of action, and all meaningful action for the sake of friendship."

Peter returned to Australia, and Blair's impressive rise in opposition drew on the American communitarianism that also had a basis in Macmurray – a strand of thought evident in the slogan "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". Blair became Labour leader in 1994, and the following year spent his first Christmas outside Britain at Peter's 158-acre farm in Victoria's high country on the edge of the Australian bush. The Blair-Gallop-Thomson friendship had evolved over the years, and Blair had by now gone on to develop his own ideas, which in turn impressed Peter.

As a result, Peter moved to Britain, where, from 1996, he was a supportive friend to the Blair family up to and beyond the following year's general election. His position as vicar of St Luke's, West Holloway, north London, left him some time to join forces with Adele Blakebrough, Helen Taylor Thompson and me. Having each experienced the difficulty of dancing with the dinosaur of government, we wanted to develop a support network for like-minded social activists and so, in 1998, Community Action Network (CAN) was born.

Peter liked the businesslike approach of the social entrepreneur, seeing in our world a practical embodiment of much of his thinking. He understood quickly that future successful social action would all be about building relationships between social entrepreneurs and the business sector, and moving on from the dependency culture so often created by the charitable sector. Peter loved our work at the Bromley by Bow centre, in east London, and understood the "learning by doing" culture and community-building at its heart.

Peter saw in this work a demonstration of what so many politicians talk about, but fail to create in practice, through the theoretical machinations of the policy group. He worried that Blair was missing the crucial practical detail on the ground, and was surrounded by young advisers who had little or no practical experience of the real world. Government understood the shape of the forest but it had little idea what was going on under the trees, which he felt was a big mistake. Change was not top down or bottom up, but grew from the inside out, through the relationships and practical actions that people took together. He continued to play an active role in CAN until he became ­determined to set about comparable work in ­Australia, and, in 2001, left for his native Melbourne.

He had grown up in the city's south-eastern seaside suburb of Brighton, the competitive and sports-mad second of four children of strict but loving parents. His father's estate agency business in the northern suburb of Carlton was doing well enough for there to be a tennis court in the back garden of their house near the beach, and the family were regular churchgoers. On leaving school at 16, Peter collected rents for his father. He recognised his ­privileged ­background and wanted to do ­something more worthwhile. Studying at Ridley ­Theological College, in Carlton, ­introduced him to Macmurray's work, which taught him to think through religion in relationship to action. What became real for him, he once said, was that every time he was involved in action, everything came alive.

Peter's ordination in 1959 was central to his life. His calling felt right, and once he had become vicar of St Alban's, North Melbourne, he introduced jazz to services and provided a lounge and library for elderly parishioners. He met his wife Helen when a friend brought her along to help with painting the church basement. "She was such a beauty that I was like a two-year-old again," he once told me. They married in 1961, and the following year moved to Britain, and the rural parish of Fen Ditton, north-east of Cambridge.

Once back in Melbourne in 1963, Peter desperately wanted to be involved in community work and to connect faith and action, so he taught maths full-time at the local high school so that his stipend could go back towards the mortgage of his church of St James, East Thornbury, and its community work. This was a little too entrepreneurial for the church authorities – one of his ­ideas was to raise ­community morale by making the church a ­hairdressing salon led by Helen – and he was warned that if he continued he would be disobeying the bishop and would be sacked. He continued and was sacked.

Then he qualified as an estate agent. His time with the family firm (1966-68) impressed his father and he was offered a directorship, but Peter's heart was not in it, and he went back into the church. In 1969 he became school chaplain at Timbertop, the outback campus of the private Geelong grammar school that the Prince of Wales had attended in 1966, just before Peter's time. However, Boris Johnson, now mayor of London, was in Peter's care once he returned from Oxford as principal of Timbertop in 1975 – he liked Boris, who was teaching there during his gap year, but thought him a little "wild".

Friends recall Peter running cross-country races with his uncertain ­adolescent charges and building strong relationships based on mutual respect. "Come on, you slack bugger, get up this hill," he would shout. "Yeah, you old bastard, I'll pass you on the next one," would be the reply. He was ­charismatic with a deep understanding of people; he could see through them. Community, individual achievement and respect for others were the lessons he wove into the curriculum. A generation of Australian leaders have been inspired by Peter. He moved to South ­Australia, as master of St Mark's ­College, Adelaide (1983-90), ­pursued his ­interest in ­community regeneration and advised the state ­government on social justice. From 1991 to 1996 he was dean of International House, Melbourne ­University, and master of the residential ­accommodation at Deakin University, Geelong.

After returning from Britain in 2001, Peter was chaplain of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, a large Australian ­welfare agency. Its chief executive officer, Nic Frances, had been at the centre of a thriving social business in ­Liverpool, and joined Peter in promoting the birth of the Social Entrepreneurs' Network (SEN) that same year. SEN spawned a social enterprise movement whose ­successes ranged from a remote Aboriginal ­community in the north-west developing a ­general store to the Samoan ­community ­reforming the crime-ridden Sydney ­suburb of Claymore, through a street barbecue that led to a neighbourhood watch scheme.

In the meantime, Blair joined his wife Cherie by becoming a Roman Catholic after resigning in 2007, and has since launched a faith foundation as the vehicle for his future projects. Once, when Neil ­Kinnock had asked Thomson to intervene in the early years of the Blair ­premiership, Peter refused. He knew the prime minister well enough to appreciate when his view was not needed: as he was fond of saying: "What people in Britain don't understand about Tony Blair is that basically he's an Australian."

Peter is survived by Helen and his children, Damian, Serena, Luke, Christian and Quentin.

Martin Wroe writes: The first I knew of Peter Thomson was a handwritten ­reference commending his application to become vicar in our north London parish of St Luke's, signed by the leader of the opposition, Tony Blair. We'd agreed to keep his appointment quiet to avoid a Sunday morning hack-fest, but Peter gave a lengthy interview to the New Statesman. I got into trouble for not telling my own then employers, the Observer. Pete got into more trouble, nearly sacked before he'd started, for waxing lyrical on his inclusive approach to gay clergy, ­terrifying the church patrons who ratify appointments.

Pete turned out to be a charmer, shining blue eyes twinking from his crumpled features, mischievous laughter pursued by a hacking cough. "Bloody hell, mate, is that the time? I'll be right down!" I'd rung him to tell him there was a wedding party in the church garden, looking for a vicar. For a man so committed to this-worldly political transformation, a lot of the time he seemed to live in another world. He could get away with it because he had what most vicars need and too many don't have – warmth, time, interest, a human touch. As comfortable living in a tiny flat on a local estate as weekending at Chequers, burying people's loved ones as sneaking the controversial Catholic theologian Hans Küng into Downing Street. If there were a cluster of people after a service outside having a smoke, he'd be one of them. And he was always as forgivable as he was forgiving. "So warm," as one parishioner put it, "you could toast your feet on him."

• Peter Ashley Thomson, clergyman and social entrepreneur, born 19 March 1936; died 16 January 2010

At 10am on Sunday 29th November 2009, I received a visit from two policemen regarding my activities in running the Seismic Shock blog. (Does exposing a vicar’s associations with extremists make me a criminal?, I wondered initially). A sergeant from the Horsforth Police related to me that he had received complaints via Surrey Police from Rev Sizer and from Dr Anthony McRoy – a lecturer at the Wales Evangelical School of Theology – who both objected to being associated with terrorists and Holocaust deniers.
...
The sergeant made clear that this was merely an informal chat...

A Christian blogger – “Vee” of LivingJourney, who is based in Australia – linked to my blog as a resource for Christians to learn about anti-Semitism in the Church, including “lots of info on Stephen Sizer and Sabeel”.

Rev Sizer left her this comment:

Dear Vee,

You must take a little more care who you brand as anti-semitic otherwise you too will be receiving a caution from the police as the young former student of Leeds did recently. One more reference to me and you will be reported.

Blessings
Stephen

I have never knowingly, to use her words, "given interviews to, endorsed or forwarded material from American white supremists and Holocaust deniers".

A Merry Christmas. Embossed, coloured postcard, divided back. Stamped - General Delivery, Vancouver, B.C. Jan 1 5 I 12. US one cent stamp. Addressed to Mr. E. C. Shaughnessy, Vancouver, B.C.

“Christmas Eve, after dinner, mother or father or both with the children, were off to buy the last of the presents, visit the shops or buy their Christmas dinner, for many left it till then. Turkey might not have been within their reach, but geese, wild or tame, took their place. Sucking pig was my favorite dish. Wild duck and grouse (50c per pair), with fine roasts of beef. Of course plum pudding was in evidence with poor as well as rich, although eggs at Xmas were $1.00 per dozen.

A great feature of Christmas time was shooting for turkeys and geese at several outlying places, and raffles for turkeys at several of the principal saloons and hotels.”

“We nearly all went to church; the Anglicans, and many Nonconformists with them, on Christmas morning, and the Catholics on Christmas Eve.”

“A special feature of the saloons on Christmas Eve was 'Egg-Nog', and all we young fellows dropped in for a glass on our way to midnight mass at the Catholic Church on Humboldt Street."

From the Colonist advertisements, there seemed no shortage of alcoholic refreshments in Victoria. William W. Gibbs's ad boasted:

Hear Land o’ Clams and Brither Scots,
Frae Clover Point to Queen Charlotte's,
If you want a glass of fine Brandy;
If you want a glass of fine Rum;
If you want a glass of fine Whisky;
If you want a glass of fine 'Bunster';
If you want a glass of fine Porter;
If you want to be waited on by a Lady:
Then make “tracks” for the
Royal Exchange, Fort Street.

According to Edgar Fawcett, for most the service at the Catholic Church "was one of the attractions of Xmas Eve, and the church was filled to overflowing, and later on there was standing room only. We went to hear the singing, which was best obtainable....

Amongst the well-dressed city people were many Cariboo miners. Trousers tucked in their boots, said trousers held in position with a belt, and maybe no coat or vest on. When the time came for the collection, all hands dug down in their pockets and a generous collection was the result....

‘Twelve-thirty’. Service is over, we are off to bed, for we must be up betimes in the morning for service at 11 o’clock.”

No related posts.

Tony Blair's admissions at the weekend give us more reason to be wary of the former PM's particular brand of piety

On Sunday Fern Britton, one of the most sympathetic presenters of religious programmes on British television, did her best to plumb the depths of Tony Blair's attitude to religion, politics and his collaboration with Bush Jr in the invasion of Iraq. She put on an energetic performance but few would disagree that she failed to control the quicksilver mind of former premier. Quicksilver is not a substance one can easily nail down.

He started with an attempt at disarming the growing criticism he faces as the Chilcot inquiry proceeds in London claiming "What your faith can't do, I'm afraid, is tell you what is the right thing". He went on to combine in his discourse the folksiness of family reminiscences – the atheistic father; the influence of Peter Thompson, the persuasive Australian spiritual mentor he met during his undergraduate days at Oxford; his marriage as an Anglican to a Catholic wife; his discovery in Catholicism of a spiritual "home" – with the persona of a man who feels he still has a world role to play out as he sits in his office in occupied East Jerusalem and ponders to the calls to prayer and the rites of the Christians, Muslims and Jews under its windows.

With the aid of his aggressive apologist Alastair Campbell and his BBC biographer Jon Sopel, the quicksilver at one moment ranged from the apparent contradictions between what he saw as "the major, major struggle" concerning Islam and to the need of his Tony Blair Faith Foundation (TBFF), to get all faiths collaborating on achieving some ill-defined common goals.

Fern Britton was intellectually and oratorically outclassed by the former premier. Yet his replies to her questions included the observation that his original reason for the invasion as being the annihilation of weapons of mass destruction (which turned out not to exist) could be swapped at will with some other justification such as the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the west's former ally against Iran.

This could not but raise anew the uneasy questions surrounding his actions in getting Britain involved with the US in the slaughter of perhaps more than an million – mostly unarmed and innocent – Iraqis and the wholesale destruction of their country's civilisation.

As these questions continue to be posed they suggest that the reserve with which he is regarded by many within the Catholic church he has adopted has been justified. Few serious Blair watchers will forget the dismissive words of Professor Michel Schooyans, a Belgian priest, professor emeritus of the Catholic University of Louvain, a leading specialist in anthropology, political philosophy, bioethics, and demographics and a member of three pontifical academies, at the Vatican in May. "The fresh 'convert'" said Schooyans, "does not hesitate to explain to the pope not only what he must do, but also what he must believe! Is he Catholic? Blair does not believe in the authority of the pope."

Despite an announcement from the TBFF that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the former archbishop of Westminster, would join it, he has not done so. Nor indeed has the cardinal accepted a place in the House of Lords at the recommendation of a Labour government. Nor again did, Archbishop Vincent Nichols find a place for the former prime minister and his wife when he was enthroned in Westminster Cathedral as Murphy-O'Connor's successor.

Tony Blair's international prestige would certainly recover if he were to achieve any success in mitigating the pressure on Palestinians at the hands of the occupiers of their lands. But that seems a remote hope indeed given his closeness to President Bush Jr or his continuing alignment with Washington and Wall Street. It will take of great deal of quicksilver to counter stark reality as he sits in Jerusalem and contemplates the battlefield of the faiths.