A reader writes:

I am not sure if you will read this as I am sure you are a very busy person with all your reading, writing, speaking, traveling and such, particularly with a new book coming out (congratulations by the way and I look forward to reading it!). But in your books it seems that people flood your in box with messages asking for your input and advice into their lives, so, seeing as your books have helped me so much, I figured I would give it a shot.

I am a 23 year old living outside the US. Ever seen I was 15 all I wanted to be was an Anglican Priest, and straight out of High School I went to college to get my Degree in Theology. When I turned 21, I was allowed join the Anglican Seminary and begin my training as a Priest. However it was not what I thought it was going to be and I really clashed and struggled with the Program and with the Leadership of the Seminary. I loved my Parish Placement, learning 'Priestcraft' as my training priest called it but I just hated living at the Seminary and the expectations on my study, training, formation and spirituality were far too great, particularly when I had to support myself finically. Anyway, I decided to leave the Seminary and now I feel really directionless. It's like something I have wanted all my life (as short as it is) has been ripped away from me.

All I want to do is serve God and make the Dream of God a reality on Earth as it is in Heaven. Sometimes I consider my options in Church Planting, but I am afraid that the part of me that is afraid that it's only because I "could't cut it" in the "real" thing. Sometimes I think I will go back one day, but that frightens me so much and I just feel so embarrassed. Sometimes I consider branching out into a different denomination, and Metropolitan Community Church has really attracted me of late and maybe I am being called to be a Pastor there, but at the cost of losing my Anglicanism? That upsets me.

I just feel so lost at the moment and unsure of what to do with my life. I am not one of those people can "just" be a Sunday Christian. My hunger and drive is to preach, teach, lead, listen, minister, pray, heal, and comfit people. I know I am called to minister and lead in some where. I just don't know.

I am not asking for you to guide me or to reveal the answer to me. I am just wondering what advice you could give a 23 year old Kingdom-hungry man?

Continue reading Q & R: From a 23 year-old reader...

In the last couple of days I've read through 'John Stott - A portrait by his friends',  edited by Chris Wright and published by IVP. There are some fascinating insights into the man and it's an excellent read.

I profoundly disagree with Stott's ecclesiology. Unlike my friend and Anglican sympathiser Carl Trueman I think he was out of order in 1966 (Stott that is) with Dr Lloyd Jones but I can just about forgive him that.

His policy of ''in it to win it'' in the Church of England hasn't led to the reformation he so desired. In fact, I would argue it is leading to disaster. The reform video by Lorna Ashworth on  'the marginalisation of faithful anglicans' is indicative of  a conservative evangelical Anglicanism which has resorted to basically begging the rest of the church of England not to be mean to them. It's difficult not to imagine, if Dr Lloyd Jones were alive today, him saying 'I told you so' and yet there is so much to admire in John Stott. The sheer self discipline of the man. Here is someone who has beat his body that he may attain the prize. (1 Cor 9:27)

The more I read of John Stott the more his Ornithology drives me round the bend. As much as I appreciate him, when are the people who write about him going to realise that most of the folk reading couldn't care less about the birds? 

There are many things about John Stott I struggle with. I was saddened when he wrote on women teachers and his view of hell, whatever it is, is not as clear as it needs to be. From a reformed, confessional perspective it's hard not to think he became somewhat unbalanced on women in ministry and social isues. The whole issue of whether Lausanne really was the cataclysmic, world changing event that is often claimed for is open to debate but there is no question he has had a remarkable world wide influence.

His personal secretary of 60 years, Frances Whitehead, wrote this ''...my earliest impressions of John as a man of the utmost integrity have proved abundantly true.  He was not only a brilliant Bible expositor, but also one who sought constantly to live out what he believed and taught. He was a man of deep convictions and total commitment, and there was no dichotomy between faith and practice. He lived to serve and please God, to bring glory to his name, and to boast in nothing but the cross of Jesus Christ. He rarely, if ever, talked about himself.'' (p59)

His successors at All Souls speak warmly of his influence. He loved the Gospel so much he wanted others, particularly those who followed him, to flourish. There seems to have been no sense in which he undermined. If you compare what happened at Westminster Chapel in the aftermath of the Dr to the transitions of All Souls from John Stott to Michael Baughen to Richard Bewes to Hugh Palmer, you have to say there is much to learn from the Anglicans in this.

Other highlights:

An issue close to Carl's heart will be the chapter on John Stott's influence on the arts and media!!!!!! 

There is a moving chapter by John Wyatt on how John Stott has coped with old age. It'll come to us all.

There may be much I disagree with John Stott about but what came across to me was the overwhelming godliness of the man and  that here is someone who embodies 2 Timothy 2 - he has been the hard working farmer, the disciplined athlete and the focused soldier. The astonishing self discipline that God has used in John Stott is something to give thanks for.

We occasionally get threads full of deconversion stories here: atheists arrive at their conclusions by some very different paths, where sometimes it was an easy and natural transition, and sometimes it was painful, agonizing, and there are still deep wounds left from parting the ways with religion. Today, though, I'd like to ask a narrower question: How did you come to accept evolution?

Some of you will find the problem odd, because you've never believed in anything else. I know when I was growing up, despite going to Sunday School and all that nonsense, my church never mentioned the subject of evolution, either to approve or disapprove; my public school classes never discussed it, either, to their disgrace. I grew up devouring books on natural history at my local library, and absorbed the evolutionary explanations within them, only getting formal training when I entered college. It was quite a shock to me to discover what kind of absurd twaddle other people thought was real science!

But others may have been instructed early on in creationism as part of their religious upbringing, and the process of learning had to involve a lot of unlearning as well. Where were you on the continuum? Was your childhood science untainted by religious dogma, or were you a full-on bible-thumping young earth creationist, or something in between? How did you wrestle the myth to the ground and drop-kick it into the local lake?

Ken MacLeod was a youthful creationist who got better, if you need an example. He brings up another interesting point, a perspective that I share: once you recognize the fallacies behind creationism, you also realize that creationism's promoters are not simply deluded folk — they are monsters of malice who are intentionally trying to undermine science education because it conflicts with their religious values, and they are perfectly willing to lie and slander to achieve their goals.

What quote-mining shows is that some people who produce creationist material are conscious liars. Behind these pseudo-science hacks are worse people yet. These are theologians who have the education to understand the conflict precisely. It's not one between 'science and the Bible'. It's a lot more stark than that. It's a conflict between a particular way of reading the Bible (what is loosely called 'literalism') and normal scientific method. There would be a certain integrity in acknowledging the conflict, admitting that there was no obvious resolution, and pointing out that we are not always given to comprehend the intent of the Ancient of Days. That at least would allow young people from these traditions to study biology and geology and astronomy without the constant arguments at home interrupting their thoughts like a buzz of static across their brains.

There's one further ironic revenge visited on all this. A frequent complaint against the New Atheists is that they're only arguing against fundamentalism, and ignoring the broader and more accommodating forms of religious belief. This isn't exactly true, but to the extent that it is, they've hit a sweet spot in the market. When I rejected fundamentalism I didn't turn to broader and more accommodating forms of religious belief. I didn't start wondering if maybe there was something to be said for Anglicanism. I just went straight over to atheism. If this is typical, and I think it is, then there must be many for whom the New Atheist books are like water in the desert. We need no condescension from those who have already found an oasis.

I've interacted with a lot of creationists over the years, and one thing I've learned is that they aren't necessarily stupid people: they are often accomplished, literate, successful in fields that aren't science, and entirely capable of following some of the most byzantine threads of logic. And yet, when they are confronted with the logic of evolution, which is relatively simple and clear and also backed by impressive amounts of empirical evidence, they balk and begin to reach desperately for the worst arguments, striving to debunk the truth with dishonesty to an exceptional degree.

It's one of the reasons I encourage students to listen to the other side. If the student has any knowledge of biology at all, they find the lies they use appalling and horrifying. And I do not hesitate to call them lies: they know better. Anyone who can ferret their way through the chaos of the Bible is smart enough to understand how to read a lucid Charles Darwin for meaning.

MacLeod's last point about the New Atheists is also valid. Encountering fundamentalism was the trigger that woke me up to the follies and fallacies of creationism, but it also made the conscious blindness of less toxic religions obvious. Over and over again, I have witnessed the silence of the churches. Over and over again, a creationist rides into town, spouts his lies and nonsense, and who rebuts them? Usually, only the atheists. Even the liberal church congregations sit quietly, many of their members even attend these talks with muted assent, and the general attitude even from sects that don't demand adherence to beliefs in a young earth is…let them abide.

I often hear the argument that not only is creationism bad science, it is bad theology. I don't accept that argument at all. In part, it's because all theology is bad, and if we're going to start winnowing out particular religious beliefs on the basis of their nonsensical nature, we can't stop with Genesis literalism — Jesus and Mohammed and Vishnu are all going to have to go, no matter how socially progressive their advocates might be. And it's also because I see all those churches, each with their brand of theology, all almost entirely silent on the theological errors of their neighbors. Bad theology apparently doesn't matter that much.

This Christmas, for perhaps the first time ever, Britain is a majority non-religious nation

Every year, researchers from the British Social Attitudes survey ask a representative sample of British people whether they regard themselves as belonging to any particular religion and, if so, to which one? When the survey first asked these questions in 1985, 63% of the respondents answered that they were Christians, compared with 34% who said they had no religion (the rest belonged to non-Christian religions).

Today, a quarter of a century on, there has been a steady and remarkable turnaround. In the latest 2010 BSA report, published earlier this month, only 42% said they were Christians while 51% now say they have no religion. Admittedly, some other surveys – including the last census – have produced different findings on these issues, usually to the advantage of the religious option. There is also a margin of error in all such exercises. All the same, and particularly since the trends in opinion over time seem well set, it is hard not to feel that this latest finding marks a cultural watershed.

This Christmas, for perhaps the first time ever, Britain is a majority non-religious nation. Most of us have probably seen this moment coming, but it is a substantial event nonetheless. It is undoubtedly a development that would have astonished our ancestors who built a Britain on the basis that we were and would remain a predominantly Protestant people. The victory of secularism would have flabbergasted them almost as much as the pope appearing on the BBC with his Thought for the Day.

The change ought certainly to inspire some national reflection, though there is no need for national breast-beating. After all, in most eyes, the BSA survey finding simply underscores things that have already become obvious. Today, our three political parties are led by two open atheists, and a prime minister who admits his faith comes and goes, a development impossible to imagine in other parts of a world, in which the loss of religion is not a uniform trend. The Britain of 50 years ago, in which religion was a far larger part of the social fabric and the national way of life, is a country we have lost.

What is more striking about the survey is how quickly the change has come – just a generation. It is not that long since everything shut on Sundays, since a majority went regularly to church of some sort, since all schoolchildren knew and sang hymns and studied the Bible even if they did not believe in it, and since the idea that public figures could be anything other than observantly Christian would have seemed unthinkable. It would be hard to say, by most yardsticks, that those were better times. They were certainly different ones. The direction of change is likely to continue. We must all get used to it.

None of this is to dismiss the religious or to disparage its institutions, let alone to imply that Christmas is unimportant. For all its secular and commercial excess, Christmas remains a surprisingly serious season, accentuated this year by the bleak weather. But it is to say that sensitive adaptation to the predominantly non-religious era is required on all sides. In many respects, Britain is handling that task quite well. Our national evolution into a less religious society is not without its skids and bumps. If anything, though, it is being managed with greater dignity than our parallel evolution into a less politicised one.

It is no more the place of a newspaper to impose a religious test on its readers than it was right for the British state to impose such tests on its office-holders in the past. In some sense, the protection of respect becomes more important with Christianity's decline. When Anglicanism held unchallenged sway, after all, it was important to assert the rights of those who disagreed with it, whether as Catholics, nonconformists, non-Christians or as atheists. Today, as an era of non-religious ascendancy begins in Britain, the importance of tolerance towards the faiths is not diminishing but increasing.

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

Kathryn Hughes takes a whistlestop tour of rural Britain from Swacking Cuckoo to Buttocks Booth

The gazetteer, or geographical dictionary, with its simultaneously exhaustive and fragmentary nature, seems remarkably suited to our times. It is a flexible form, able to focus on the particular – a fine church, hammer pond or run of ancient oaks – without any pressure to make the detail cohere into a larger story of place, let alone nation. The feeling you are left with after reading Clive Aslet's monumental guide to rural Britain, as well as David McKie's McKie's Gazetteer (Atlantic), reissued in paperback in time for Christmas, is of having been shown a great deal while remaining aware that this is hardly the whole story. Theirs is a landscape that is both deeply felt in some places, yet thrillingly unmapped in others. Take a left turn off their carefully marked tracks and you feel you might discover somewhere all your very own.

Whereas McKie's interest centres on the people rather than the places he visits, Aslet draws upon his background as an architectural writer and keeps mainly to the sticks and stones that have constructed what his sub-title declares to be "the 500 villages that made the countryside". This, in itself, is a rather odd formulation, since it could just as easily be the countryside that made the 500 villages. Perhaps, though, this is part of Aslet's more general point that "the village" occupies a totemic status in the British imagination which grants it almost supernatural powers. Far more than merely a chance arrangement of pond, post office and old church yew, the village has become the place where the British imagination resides, even while its body is mostly squeezed into a semi on an arterial road somewhere south of Croydon.

Aslet has picked his villages on account of the stories they tell about a time when Britain was organised very differently from today. Thus a visit to Burwash in East Sussex gives him the chance to remind us that the leafy Weald was once the centre of the iron trade, a place of proto-industrialisation with all its attendant social and political vexations. Alderley Edge in Cheshire, meanwhile, reaches right back into prehistory. The place that is now synonymous with footballers and Coronation Street stars got its name from the spectacular sandstone ledge that makes it, minerally speaking, one of the richest places in Britain. In Aslet's careful hands, even somewhere as unpromising as Gatwick airport turns out to have its soulful side. He tells us how second world war pilots coming in to land from German raids would look down to see farm labourers raking up the hay.

Aslet is careful, though, not to make one village blur into another in a lovely fug of Queen Anne brickwork and exemplary duck ponds, where everyone is unaccountably nice. He reminds us that the countryside is still a place where religion matters passionately, which is to say divisively. Village Anglicanism is not all about lady vicars in colourful jumpers welcoming everyone into the vestry with a packet of Hobnobs. In Berwick, East Sussex, the congregation remains "high" and tartly resistant to female ordination. Anyone who wants to duck the arcane ritual of the parish church is obliged to troop down to the village hall in nearby Berwick Station, where they are permitted to belt out hymns to their hearts' content.

In this same finely discriminating way, Aslet warns us against sloppy thinking when it comes to villages with literary associations. Juniper Hill, Flora Thompson's Lark Rise, was a place of bent backs and badly mended limbs rather than an arcadia for fresh-faced young rustics to sport in. The village in Cider with Rosie which went by the unlovely name of "Slad" was immortalised while Laurie Lee was marinating dizzily under a Mediterranean sun. Even Cookham Dean, where Kenneth Grahame set his riverbank tales, was not quite what it seemed. By the time The Wind in the Willows was published in 1908, commuters (stoats and weasels by another name) were already moving in, leaving Grahame and his wife to hightail it to the downs outside Didcot.

What Villages of Britain tells us loud and clear is that rural communities, whose appeal rests on their perceived changelessness, are always in a state of flux. There is a kind of Darwinism at work which ensures that some, such as Snap in Wiltshire, simply disappear. Others, such as Fordwich in Kent, are obliged to give up the thing that made them special – in this case the right to execute people by throwing them down a well – and embrace dull conformity instead. Other villages again accept that life must develop, but still can't help looking wistfully backwards. In 1577 the vicar of Radwinter in Essex asked his older parishioners what had changed in their lifetime. Most spoke wonderingly of the way that houses these days were full of luxuries such as tapestries and chimneys. There was one thing, though, that bothered them. Surely, the ancient ones suggested, the fact that no one used a hard log as a headrest any more was cause for concern? They were all for being comfortable, but a nation on the point of defending itself against the Spanish Armada should surely not be indulging itself with squishy pillows.

Wales does remarkably well in Aslet's guide, as it does in McKie's Gazetteer, with Scotland uncharacteristically taking second place. McKie particularly likes his Victorian scoundrels, and a trip to Llanthony Priory gives him the opportunity to sketch the preposterous life and times of Walter Savage Landor, a naughty poet, who bought the ancient ruin in Monmouthshire in 1807 with the idea of restoring it while becoming a model landlord in the process. The local farmers remained unimpressed, although the fact that Landor was writing rude poems about them in Latin probably passed them by. The whole business ended in characteristic muddle, with Landor storming off to the continent, leaving his mother to sort out the mess. All the same, Llanthony remains a place of wonder, a series of ruined arches framing the Black Mountains.

Aslet, meanwhile, is not afraid to break this spell of drowsy charm, and tackle a Welsh village whose name is synonymous with utter darkness. In 1966 Pantglas junior school was buried under a wave of pit slurry. One hundred and forty four people died, 116 of them children. In a few slow-motion minutes the name "Aberfan" entered the language as a word signalling the kind of loss too deep to be described directly. Aslet, though, is careful not to invite us to become mere gawpers. He uses his visit to Aberfan to point out the way that our industrial landscape has been transformed over the past 50 years. With slag heaps levelled, or at least re-contoured, we have lost that visual reminder of a time when Britain wrested its wealth from the dark heart of the earth.

Both Aslet's and McKie's books are ones to dip into rather than read right through. Initially you will probably search greedily for your own places – the village where you were born, the place you went each year on holiday. But once you have satisfied this first solipsistic rush, and perhaps felt put-out when you haven't found your special sites, you will start to settle down and wander at will through places with names such as Swacking Cuckoo, Buttocks Booth or Slapfaggot Green.

Villages of Britain and McKie's Gazetteer are part of that current nostalgia for all things mid-20th century – hence the recent re-issue of another text which stands as godfather to them both, The Shell Country Alphabet, edited by Geoffrey Grigson. But it's not just about an easy capitulation to an imaginary arcadia of slow time and good manners. As Clive Aslet himself points out, with fossil fuel dwindling and electronic media connecting us in new ways, we may once again see Britain's odd corners filling out. And if that happens then our villages may once again bustle with active full-time citizens rather than drowsy second-homers. And as Britain's manmade landscape changes yet again, we will need such thoughtful, witty guides to show us how it looks.

Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by Harper Perennial.

The former dean of Southwark would have been a fierce critic of conservative evangelical resistance to the Anglican covenant

Colin Slee, the dean of Southwark and one of the doughtiest and most outspoken liberals in the Church of England, died overnight, within a few weeks of suffering the galloping onset of cancer. When I last saw him, a couple of weeks ago in hospital, he told me all passion was spent and he felt he no longer had any enemies within the church, but I guess had he still been as hale as he was a few months ago and able to attend this week's general synod in London, of which he remained a member, he would have snorted in derision and despair at yesterday's goings on in the Anglican communion.

In brief, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, pleaded with the synod on Tuesday to vote in favour of the Anglican covenant, the compromise plan painfully drawn up over seven years largely to appease conservative evangelicals within the worldwide church who have been outraged over the existence of gay clergy. The covenant would comprise a set of agreed principles for Anglicanism and include mechanisms for censuring out-of-line provinces within the communion – for which read the American Episcopal Church which had the temerity to elect a gay bishop in 2003 – and exclude them from the inner counsels of the denomination. Liberals within the church have been decidedly sniffy about the covenant, believing it would undermine the traditional autonomy of national churches in making their own decisions and open the way for conservatives – such as the homophobic archbishops of central Africa – to veto innovations in other provinces they dislike.

But the covenant is also regarded by many, including the archbishop, and many more moderate evangelicals, as the only way of safeguarding the future international unity of the church. It will need to be adopted by each of its 38 provinces worldwide. It is, as one senior church official said to me, the only game in town: there is no plan B. The Church of England synod's assent was therefore vital and Rowan's plea was particularly heartfelt and even-handed in blaming both conservatives and liberals for the continuing crisis. He called for mutual understanding and tolerance and received an ovation.

At the end of Wednesday's debate, the synod loyally voted overwhelmingly to pursue the covenant idea further. And within minutes, a number of African archbishops and other conservatives, who had met privately earlier in the month, issued a statement saying they no longer supported the covenant because it was not strict enough for them. They, of course, had waited to deliver the snub until after the vote was over. It is par for the course, fostered and encouraged by the sort of conservative evangelicals within the Church of England who dance attendance on them – it is no surprise that their meeting was in Oxford where leaders of the insurgency are based. The message is – as it has been so often in the last few years: archbishops to Rowan: drop dead.

Perhaps now, finally, the covenant wheeze is dead, killed off by the very prelates it was supposed to appease. And perhaps now the archbishop of Canterbury will return to his former instincts and appreciate that the true splitters are not the wicked liberals who warned against the covenant, but those conservatives determined get their own way and wrest Anglicanism in their reactionary direction so that it becomes something it was never meant to be. Colin Slee would have understood that and spoken fiercely against them as he so often did. Liberals in the church must today be asking who will be courageous enough to take his place.

With the news that the Free Church have adopted a more open position on worship the usual discussions are beginning to be had. 'Why don't you Presbyterians just get together.'  It's true that the Free Church's decision does open up a great possibility for a UK Presbyterian Church but what stops denominations merging?

There are obvious doctrinal barriers which are easy to spot and explain but if truth be told the issue of chemistry is probably the big thing.

I mean by chemistry that instinctive knowledge and feeling that I can work with these people.  When we talk about ministry we're talking about the same thing, our understanding of the gospel and church life is shared.  Doctrinally I can be in complete agreement in subscribing to the Westminster Confession of Faith with someone but if when we talk about the nitty gritty of how ministry gets done, how the priorities of church life are set, if there's a difference in our understanding of those things,  realistically I'm probably not going to work with them. Call me a pragmatist but as far as I can see that is pretty much how the reformed church works worldwide.

Should this be a barrier to being in the same denomination? Probably not but we mustn't be naive, what would happen if all UK Presbyterians were in the same denomination? We would probably form into cluster pressure groups, somewhat similar to what you have in the PCA (I may be wrong about that as I know remarkably little about the US scene apart from what sensei Trueman has taught me) . Our priority would lie with our like minded pressure group not necessarily the denomination.   There would be a unity in being part of one church but realistically that unity at present would probably just be organisational. That in itself of course is not a bad thing.

Not only do I want to agree confessionally but I want to agree with their ethos to work alongside them. This is probably unbiblical on my part. I'm aware that the Westminster Confession of Faith is a consensus document and so was always intended for a broad church if I can call it that and so if there was going to be any movement towards a coming together of denominations it would seem to me there needs to be an allowance for some difference in ethos.

How do you move forward?  That's the big question, there is no doubt in the UK we are in ecclesiological meltdown.  No one knows what the state of Anglicanism will be in 5 years.  Presbyterians particularly in England are a peculiar tiny sect and we have far too high a view of our own importance. There's no doubt that if we merged into a UK Presbyterian church it would be stronger but the answer is not simple and neither can it be assumed that we can all practically work together. I suppose the first step is talking but after that my wisdom runs out.

Rowan Williams tells warring factions to pull together for crucial General Synod vote on church's future

Dr Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, warned of the risk of "piece-by-piece dissolution" of worldwide Anglicanism in a heartfelt personal plea today to warring factions in the Church of England.

At the opening of the church's general synod in London, he called for all parties to put aside their disputes and agree on a fresh framework for settling differences across the 70 million-strong international communion.

The synod votes tomorrow on the Anglican covenant, which has been seven years in the making, and sets the Church of England at a crucial crossroads. The church is already facing probable defections to Roman Catholicism by some priests opposed to the ordination of women bishops.

The covenant was devised in response to divisions caused by the US Episcopal Church's decision to endorse the election of the openly-gay bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, and it has to be endorsed by all 38 previously autonomous provinces of the communion across the world. The vote will be crucial as not only is the Church of England the mother church of the communion, but Williams is its spiritual head. A senior church official told the Guardian: "There is no Plan B. If this falls, the communion is in ruins."

In advance of the vote – which is technically to refer the covenant to dioceses for consultation – supporters and opponents have indulged in heated rhetoric; liberal Anglicans claimed it would spell the end of individual churches' autonomy and subject decisions of the Church of England to the prior approval of reactionary churches such as the homophobic conservatives of equatorial Africa. Gregory Cameron, the Bishop of St Asaph in Wales, the canon lawyer mainly responsible for drawing up the covenant, likened opponents to the BNP.

Williams used his presidential address to the first day of the general synod to urge both sides to calm down, listen to each other and work through their differences.

"For God's sake," he said. "Don't let us waste time and energy talking or behaving as if there were competition going on here ... I don't think we are doing the job for which God has called us here if we reproduce the worst aspects of secular partisanship."

He told the synod it was an "illusion" to think the communion could "carry on as usual" without some changes. And it was a "greater illusion" to think the Church of England could "derail the entire process" of the adoption of the covenant, a text that opponents claim will define who belongs and discipline those who flout rules.

"The unpalatable fact is that certain decisions in any province affect all," he said. "If we ignore this, we ignore what is already a real danger, the piece-by-piece dissolution of the communion and the emergence of structures in which relation to the Church of England and the See of Canterbury are likely not to figure very significantly."

Williams, who has tried to keep disparate churches talking rather than leave the communion altogether, articulated the hopelessness of taking up entrenched positions on homosexuality, criticising both sides in the debate.

Aides say he has been depressed by the battle. He said: "It is unthinkingly treated by some as almost the sole test of biblical fidelity or doctrinal orthodoxy. It is unthinkingly regarded by others as one of those matters on which the church must be brought into line with what our culture can make sense of ... The covenant proposals are the only sign at the moment of the work that has to be done."

Anglican provinces would only belong to the communion if they signed up to the covenant, he said. They would agree not to proceed with any development that fellow members anywhere in the world objected to.

The archbishop acknowledged that he was "bound to accept" his share of "reproach" for the lack of progress in major debates and invited the synod to help him do better by creating an "ambience where better understanding may happen".

Earlier, the supreme governor of the Church of England, the Queen, addressed the synod, reflecting on the "difficult, painful choices" ahead.

About 480 clergy, laity and bishops will debate and vote on issues affecting the life of the Church of the England

The Queen will today inaugurate the ninth General Synod of the Church of England, attending a eucharist at Westminster Abbey and briefly addressing the bishops, clergy and laity that make up the membership of the governing body.

Around 480 clergy, laity and bishops are gathered in central London, some for the first time, to debate and vote on issues and policies affecting the life of the church.

Among these is the Anglican Covenant, which will define how the Communion stays together in the face of divisive moves such as sending clergy to another country without its agreement, electing openly homosexual priests or blessing same-sex unions.

Critics warn it will "redefine Anglicanism" and would make the Communion "more dogmatic, inward looking and backward looking".

Anglican provinces would only belong to the Communion if they signed up to the covenant. They would agree, among other things, not to proceed with any new development that fellow members anywhere in the world objected to.

Supporters claim it is the only way to avoid ever deeper divisions between provinces already at a theological impasse with one another.

Another debate will centre on David Cameron's vision of a Big Society, an area in which the Church of England believes it has much to contribute. It is already seeking millions in state funding to promote social and community cohesion, claiming it can make more of a difference than the government's own £61m strategy.

This Synod has experienced significant changes in its make-up: 35% of elected members are starting their first five-year term, the proportion of elected clergy who are female has increased from 21% to 28% and women now comprise 46% of the elected laity membership, up from 40%.

This afternoon the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Rowan Williams, gives his customary presidential address against the by now familiar backdrop of controversy and upheaval that inevitably surrounds Synod gatherings.

This time it is his acknowledgement that some parishes will be without priests when around 50 convert next year to Roman Catholicism through a Vatican initiative for disaffected Anglicans.

The initiative, known as a personal ordinariate, is the response by Benedict XVI to the demands of traditionalists who are unhappy with liberal developments in the Church of England – such as the ordination of women as bishops – and want to convert to Catholicism but retain elements of their Anglican heritage.

There is also disquiet about the hitherto unknown assistant bishop of Willesden, Pete Broadbent, who wrote on Facebook that the marriage of Kate Middleton and Prince William would last seven years.

"We need a party in Calais for all good republicans who can't stand the nauseating tosh that surrounds this event," he said, referring to the wedding day.

The bishop made the comments last Wednesday, saying marriages should be about family, not "some piece of national flim-flam paid for out of our taxes, for a couple whose lives are going to be persecuted and spoilt by an ignorant media".

After criticising royalty for a history of broken marriages and a "corrupt and sexist" hereditary principle, he then went on to attack the "gutter press" for "persecuting" the royal family.

Yesterday, Broadbent apologised for his remarks, calling them "deeply offensive".

"It was unwise of me to engage in a debate with others on a semi-public internet forum and to express myself in such language.

"I accept that this was a major error of judgement on my part. I wish Prince William and Kate Middleton a happy and lifelong marriage, and will hold them in my prayers."

Synod ends tomorrow.

PROMINENT HINDU statesman Rajan Zed has asked Belgium to recognise Hinduism. Belgian government reportedly accords recognised status to Catholicism, Protestantism , Anglicanism, Orthodox Christianity, secular humanist groups, Islam, and Judaism.

If he now accepts that condoms can prevent the spread of Aids, how else may his teaching change?

As Pope Benedict sat down with the German journalist Peter Seewald at the papacy's summer residence a few months ago, he probably never imagined that his cautious remarks on condoms would spark international excitement. He appears to be constantly surprised that his ruminations should be noticed.

Benedict reiterated the Catholic church's longstanding and dogmatic opposition to artificial birth control, which remains a grave sin – though honoured rather more in the breach than the observance by many of the faithful, certainly in the western world. And, as some Catholic theologians and even several cardinals – including the former archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor – have argued in recent years, using a condom to prevent a greater evil, the passing on of a lethal virus, may be licit.

But it is the implication of his statement – and the fact that the pope has made it himself – that changes things. "In certain cases, where the intention is to reduce the risk of infection, [condom use] can nevertheless be a first step on the way to another, more humane, sexuality," he said, adding: "There may be justified individual cases, for example when a male prostitute uses a condom."

For more than 40 years the church hierarchy has tied itself up in rhetorical knots to justify the encyclical Humanae Vitae of 1968, in which Pope Paul VI overturned the advice of his own papal commission to restate the church's opposition to any artificial birth control.

Now, suddenly and maybe grudgingly, Benedict has acknowledged the weight of pragmatic advice and implicitly accepted the medical case that condoms do indeed help to prevent the spread of infection. He even seems to recognise, by the term male prostitute, that people who in his terms should not be having sex at all do so, and therefore need protection, especially if ultimately it helps them see the light.

Welcome – marginally – to the real world. Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, who claimed in 2003 that the Aids virus could percolate through little holes in condoms that only he could see, must be turning in his grave. Benedict sidelined Trujillo when he became pope, so perhaps he always had doubts about the Colombian's credibility.

The church's position on sex has long contained doses of hypocrisy. Even in times of mass religious observance, it has been well aware that its rules have been flouted or ignored. You can dress it up as the dictates of conscience, or pragmatism, or even human sinfulness, but women have always attempted to practise birth control or, if that failed, risked abortions.

A recent US survey found 40% of women seeking abortions were Catholic (and a further 40% belonged to other religious groups) – proportions that have probably scarcely altered, despite all the condemnation, since the mid-19th century, when one in six pregnancies in the US are thought to have been aborted. Even the rhythm method, or natural family planning as the church calls it, is a form of birth control, in that it attempts to avoid procreation.

Perhaps lapsed Catholics like me should welcome the pope's shuffle. At least it starts to undermine one of the Vatican's least intellectually coherent positions: the thin end of a very long wedge. If this can change, what else might follow, if not under this ageing pontiff then his successor? We already have some married priests, converted from Anglicanism. What if the next pope, in response to a divine revelation to answer the shortage of vocations, decided that women could be ordained too? Where would Church of England refugees be then?

Niceness may carry the measure, but it won't make the covenant the turbine of a more mutually engaged global denomination

Will the covenant kill or cure?

In the Hebrew scriptures, people cut covenants by chopping a bird in half and walking between the halves to indicate sincere meeting of hearts and minds.

The Anglican Communion is proposing a fractionally less messy covenant between member churches – part of the fallout from the Windsor report, which attempted to resolve its gay bishops row in 2003. Perceptions have progressed faster these last seven years in the world, perhaps, than in the higher echelons of the Anglican Communion.

General Synod is scheduled to vote the covenant through on the nod next Wednesday, but amid low rumbling in the ranks. Every week around 200 readers of the Church Times opine on an issue of the day. Last week almost a thousand did, 83% of them against the covenant. Three years ago, Canon David Bayne from Scotland, where covenants have been salami slicing the kirk for donkey's years, described it (I hope in the rolling Scots associated with the late lamented Dr Finlay) as "95% sugar and 5% strychnine."

The covenant's early sections are unexceptionable if overlong, a clear historic account of Anglicanism. They do not make exclusive or imperialistic claims.

They are the Anglican equivalent of a solemn formulation that mothers have babies, apples have pies, the pope is Roman Catholic, and the bears' latrines are located, guess where, in the woods. Phew!

Section four is rather more trixical, some say toxic. Hitherto various Anglican bodies and individuals have interacted mostly informally in response to innovations in the Anglican world. The covenant aims to establish a more disciplined engagement – a new kind of denominational quality assurance.

Blame will be easier to assign to the actions of provinces that innovate in ways of which others disapprove.

Such a process represents a more developed system than archbishop Geoffrey Fisher knew. In 1951 he said: "We have no doctrine of our own – we only possess the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic church enshrined in the Catholic creeds, and those creeds we hold without addition or diminution." Fisher was no woolly liberal. Why is his doctrinal standground no longer adequate?

The main reason is that recent controversies have centred on hot-button anthropological issues outwith the historic creeds, almost unknown in scripture. Questions that used to be raw material for third-year ordinands' ethics essays have now become prime shibboleths, so new mechanisms may be necessary to ensure alignment within the communion.

Selling section four requires a delicate balancing act. For Conservatives and Liberals both to sign up, the former have to believe the covenant will be a powerful weapon against innovation, while, simultaneously, the latter think the exact opposite. This is a tall order.

There is an additional problem. The only Anglicans who theologised culture wars in the first place were Liberal or Conservative zealots. Others never had a Communion-breaking problem anyway – enough for them to muddle through, trying to love their crooked neighbour with all their crooked heart.

Niceness may be enough to carry a measure through an inexperienced and supine General Synod, but it can hardly make the covenant a transformative consciousness raiser, let alone the turbine of a more mutually engaged global denomination. However the General Synod votes, the big issue for the covenant process thereafter will be securing buy-in, confronted by zealots' disappointment and majority indifference.

It is often observed that individual Anglicans around the world recognise, like and enjoy each other's company. They generally get on like a house on fire at local level. Their institutional quadrille is where the problems lie. Covenant afficionados may hope beefing up the formal denomination will improve informal relationships. Others fear beefier formalities will sour them.

One Conservative blogger announced this week, tongue slightly in cheek perhaps, that he had believed the covenant useless, until it had been drawn to his attention how much it annoyed Liberals. Et voilà. Even as a kicking foetus, the covenant is already annoying people. This doesn't imply that once born it will only be used only to promote understanding and harmony. Nice people will use it nicely – others won't. Real copper-bottomed zealots will almost certainly carry on regardless. The god of unintended consequences will stand in the background, smiling.

Gay clergyman has retained the support of his congregation – but seven years as a controversial figure have taken their toll

On the day he was consecrated as the US Episcopal Church's bishop of New Hampshire in November 2003, Gene Robinson and his partner Mark Andrew wore bulletproof vests following assassination threats.

Inside the ceremony at a university sports hall in the New England university town of Durham a clergyman intervened to denounce gays in lubricious detail, while outside a bedraggled group of demonstrators waved banners warning "Fags Doom Nations".

From Africa, the archbishop of Kenya warned "the devil has entered the church", while a few days before the ceremony Robinson received a postcard from England, depicting the high altar of Durham cathedral and bearing the message: "You fornicating, lecherous pig."

Gene Robinson was not the first gay bishop in the world, nor is he the only one, but he was the first in the Anglican communion openly to admit to his homosexuality. The congregations of his diocese in one of the most politically conservative states in the US knew about his sexuality – he had been a clergyman there for many years – and elected him anyway.

Their decision outraged conservative evangelicals around the world, some of whom launched a discreditable campaign of smears and innuendos to stop him being confirmed.

They claimed, falsely, that he had abandoned his wife and children, that he had behaved inappropriately by touching a man (on the arm) at a public meeting and even that he had sponsored a pornographic website – all lies. English bishops were intrigued by this wicked man, of whom they had previously never heard, and asked questions that implied they imagined him to have horns and cloven feet. Had they but known, Robinson, from a poor Southern share-cropping background, was one of the most evangelical of American bishops.

His election served as a catalyst within the worldwide communion, where a faction of conservatives saw an opportunity to wrest the church in their direction by mobilising parishioners united by a visceral distaste for homosexuality.

In this they could also make common cause with the church in the third world, particularly equatorial Africa, newly assertive of its influence in a previously white-man dominated denomination and in cultural denial of the existence of gay people.

Exactly seven years on, Anglicanism is still groaning under the crisis but has not entirely split.

Far from disintegrating, Robinson's own diocese has remained supportive of him. Robinson's wish to become known as the bishop of New Hampshire, rather than the gay bishop, has not, however, been granted.

He has acknowledged that his position and all it entails has taken a heavy toll. Four years ago he underwent treatment for alcoholism. He still fits the description given to him on the eve of his consecration by his Kentucky home-town newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, when it called him: "The most controversial Anglican leader since Henry VIII."

Stephen Bates is a former religious affairs correspondent for the Guardian and the author of A Church at War: Anglicans and Homosexuality

Though the gay bishop is retiring early, some day the Anglican church hierarchy will see homophobia as an evil

Gene Robinson and I were sitting in a pub just behind St Paul's Cathedral a few months ago. He drank lime and soda. I had something stronger. "You drink the first drink, then the next drink drinks you," he warned me. Ever the evangelical of his past, Robinson's concern for my drinking was rooted in bitter experience.

For him the booze had been just one of the temptations in dealing with the bucketloads of hate that have been poured over him since he became bishop of New Hampshire in 2004. Being the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion has, as he put it, "taken its toll". His announcement this weekend that he is retiring as the bishop of New Hampshire in a few years' time can come as little surprise.

There are many gay men and women in the church serving as priests and bishops, but as the focus of such international attention, he has had it toughest of all: the death threats, the abusive letters and phone calls, the heckling during sermons, the constant pressure to justify himself and his faith. At the last international gathering of all the world's bishops, the Lambeth Conference, he was barred by the archbishop of Canterbury. A lesser man would not have been able to cope, nor do so with such gentleness and grace.

There is no doubt in my mind that Robinson has been a prophet in the Anglican communion, recalling the church to its best instincts of inclusion and commitment to those who are excluded and marginalised. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, rich nor poor, black nor white, gay nor straight. Some day this will be as obvious to the church as the fact that slavery is evil. But the forces of reaction remain strong and are getting stronger.

The latest thinking within the church to exclude new Gene Robinsons is called the covenant, due to be discussed at General Synod this month. The idea is that conservative anti-gay provinces – places like Uganda and Nigeria where Anglicanism is numerically on the up – will have a legal mechanism to stop more progressive churches from following the Gospel as they understand it.

In a particularly nasty twist of the culture wars that are developing around this issue, the architect of the covenant, the Right Rev Gregory Cameron, bishop of St Asaph in Wales, has accused those who are against the covenant of racism. Those, like me, who fear the homophobia that is prevalent in many parts of the world are attacked as "little Englanders". At the time of writing, a Church Times online survey asking "Should the church reject the Anglican covenant?" shows 84% saying that we should.

The Church of England – and by that I mean the ordinary man and woman in the pew – is considerably more progressive, on women bishops and gay marriage, than its conservative and often overly fearful leadership. Churchgoers know that the time for change is overdue. And many have come to see this because of the inspiring and compassionate faith of people like Robinson.

For too long Christianity has lent the bigotry of homophobia a cloak of respectability. Robinson is, of course, quite right to shout loudly about those "tragic stories of teenagers who have taken their own lives because religion tells them they are an abomination before God, and who believe their lives are doomed to despair and unhappiness". These days the alibi for this sort of prejudice is called unity – that we mustn't do anything that might upset our conservative brothers and sisters. Indeed, had the covenant existed in the era of the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures, it would have provided a perfect way of muzzling them too.

The Anglican church's version of Christianity is full of charming but deadly imperial ghosts. It needs an almighty exorcism

I have moved to New York, for I don't know how long. I don't think I've emigrated, but for the first time in my life it's a possibility. I used to assume I was too patriotic to think of living elsewhere for long, but I have gradually found my patriotism wearing thin. Religion is at the heart of this.

I have found the English way of religion to be dominated by nostalgia, class, and embarrassed evasion. It has no real interest in reforming itself; indeed it is deeply inoculated against reform. It would take an uber-Luther to get the necessary debate rolling.

Nostalgia is the most obvious, and serious, charge. Christianity has taken many forms in its time, and it has been mixed with all sorts of other creeds, from Thor-worship to Marxism, but never has it been so deeply mixed with nostalgia. To be an Anglican is to subscribe to a version of Christianity that's full of charming but deadly imperial ghosts. It needs an almighty exorcism.

The unholy ghost-in-chief is of course establishment, which is the pretence that we still live in the pre-liberal era, when nations had official established religions that unified them. Isn't this just a harmless link to our past? Yes and no: in secular political terms it doesn't seem to bother people, so maybe we should let sleeping unicorns lie. But it ought to bother Christians very much. For it sows enmity between Christianity and the modern liberal state. It idealises the theocratic monoculture we used to be. It is terrifically bad gospel-communication.

Many will say that establishment has become so weak in recent decades that it's not worth complaining about. I disagree. In some ways it now dominates national Christianity more than it used to. The established church used to be balanced by a liberal Christian tradition, pushing for reform, known as nonconformity, or dissent. This religious opposition has crumbled into dust over the last generation or two. British Christianity has become a two-horse race, with Roman Catholicism looking increasingly fanciable.

The nostalgic logic of the established church has class implications. English Anglicanism has always been reliant on its strong links with the ruling class; these links have been sustained by Oxbridge and the public schools. The church remains reliant on its home-counties comfort-zone, on the parishioners of Dibley. In urban areas, the pews only fill when there's a popular church school, and pushy mums are sniffing round the vicar's cassock (dads generally opt out of this game). If they don't get in with him quick, their darlings might end up on playdates with Wayne and Khaliq rather than Charlie and Lola. It's a spiritually disgusting scam, and just about everyone knows it, but the vested class interests are too strong for it to stop.

The result of this rotten established church is a culture whose response to religion veers between hostility and embarrassment. It is little wonder that people grow up averse to religion, and find Richard Dawkins attractive: they sense the reliance of English religion on nostalgia and class. As they grow up a bit more they admit that the church is a useful provider of wedding and funeral rites and should therefore be tolerated. It's a practical necessity like a sewage plant or an abattoir. But that doesn't make it worthy of cultural attention and respect. To be actively interested in religion is considered distinctly odd.

In America, by contrast, religion is acknowledged to be part of culture, part of psychology, part of history and politics, part of life. Of course American Christianity can take dubious and illiberal forms, but its basic relationship with liberty is assumed to be a positive one. It is taken seriously by the mainstream media, even by most artists and intellectuals. It is not swept under the carpet, until you need a funeral service or a place at the church school. When it comes to religion, the Americans really are freer and braver than us – but that isn't very hard.

Church proposes covenant involving divisive issues like electing openly gay priests or blessing same-sex unions

Liberal Anglicans today launched a campaign to fight guidelines they claim will make the church "more dogmatic".

Next month the general synod, the governing body of the Church of England, votes on whether to approve a constitution that will define how the communion stays together in the face of divisive issues such as sending clergy to another country without its agreement, electing openly homosexual priests or blessing same-sex unions.

But the groups, Inclusive Church and Modern Church, warn the covenant will "redefine Anglicanism". In full-page adverts, appearing this week in church publications, they say the covenant will make the communion "more dogmatic, inward looking and backward looking".

Anglican provinces would only belong to the communion if they signed up to the covenant. They would agree, among other things, not to proceed with any new development that fellow members anywhere in the world objected to.

The covenant would give overseas churches power over the Church of England and vice versa. The groups claim it would make the Church of England "subject to an outside power for the first time since Henry VIII".

It said: "At present general synod openly debates proposals and votes on them. The covenant would oblige it to 'act with diligence, care and caution in respect of any action which may provoke controversy, which by its intensity, substance or extent could threaten the unity of the communion'.

"This would put pressure on churches to avoid changes which other Anglicans might dislike."

Outside organisations are also allowed to sign up to the covenant, a move that could lead to official recognition of breakway conservative factions that dislike liberal churches in the US and Canada.

The archbishop of Canterbury acknowledges the covenant will not appeal to everyone.

In his Pentecost letter to the Anglican Communion Dr Rowan Williams said: "I want to stress yet again that the covenant is not envisaged as an instrument of control. We are at a point in our common life where broken communications and fragile relationships have created a very mistrustful climate. This is not news. But many have a sense that the current risks are greater than ever.

"Whatever happens to our structures, we still need to preserve both working relationships and places for exchange and discussion."

The campaign against the covenant will continue until the synod debate on 24 November. If it is referred to the dioceses for consultation, the campaign will continue throughout 2011.

My atheist 'sermon' in Westminster Abbey seems incongruous, but it shows good faith is more important than the right beliefs

Last Monday, I delivered an atheist "sermon" from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey. It was surprising enough that the chaplain of Westminster School had invited me to give a "thought for the day" to the assembled students, even more so when he suggested I talked about why I was an atheist.

The fact that this sounds strange, shocking even, tells us something important about how atheism is now perceived, and its relationship to faith. The problem is that while the word atheist itself means nothing more than "not-theist", it seems that for many, "a" stands for anti.

Of course, in one sense, anyone who believes anything can be described as being anti what they don't believe. But, for instance, we would not usually call a Christian an anti-Jew, or a Muslim an anti-Hindu. Why not? Because being anti suggests more than just disagreement; it suggests hostility, active dislike, the desire to eliminate the thing one is against. That's why anti-capitalists are rightly called, because they don't just disagree with capitalism, they want to destroy it.

If being an atheist meant being anti-theist, then I would not be one. I am an anti-dogmatist, an anti-fundamentalist, yes. But I have no hostility to theism as such, and have no desire to strip all theists of their faith. Of course I think theists are mistaken, but no one should be automatically hostile to everyone they disagree with. Hostility should be reserved for the pernicious, the wicked and the harmful.

Of course, there are plenty of atheists who do think that all religion is harmful, and that every person who believes in God is being hampered by a terrible illusion. Plenty of atheists are anti-theists. What is more, this breed of atheist tends to attract more attention, so for many, this is just what atheism seems to be.

But there are also lots of atheists like me. We simply do not believe in God because we see no good reason to do so. To invite us into the citadels of faith and ask us to explain what we believe is therefore not to bring the enemy though the gate, simply because we are not the enemy.

I would suggest that a far greater enemy to the kind of liberal Anglicanism that has prevailed in the Church of England, custodian of Westminster Abbey, would be a biblical literalist. But I do not imagine that the decision to allow such a person to talk in Westminster Abbey would raise as many eyebrows as the decision to let an atheist do so. Somehow, it has become received wisdom that the most important division is between people of faith and people of none. This is not only false, it is unchristian. Time and again in the gospels, Jesus argues that it is better to be a good gentile than a bad Jew. The Samaritan is more of a friend to the Christian that the Pharisee who walks by on the other side. What matters more than having the right faith is acting in good faith.

Dividing the world up into believers and non-believers, while accurate in many ways, doesn't draw the distinction between friends and foes. I see my allies as being the community of the reasonable, and my enemies as the community of blind faith and dogmatism. Any religion that is not unreasonable and not dogmatic should likewise recognise that it has a kinship with atheists who hold those same values. And it should realise that it has more to fear from other people of faith who deny those values than it does from reasonable atheists like myself.

So my time in the pulpit is not so incongruous after all. That it seems that way to many simply reflects two sad facts: that atheism has come to be seen as anti-theism, and that, perhaps partly in response, we expect people of faith to forge not-that-holy alliances with each other rather than far better unholy alliances with kindred non-believers. We should challenge both those assumptions, for the sake of values that good believers and good atheists alike hold dear.

Two postcard portraits of the recently-beatified John Henry Newman have graced my office for years. One is a miniature painted by Sir William Charles Ross in 1845, the year of Newman’s reception into the Catholic Church. The second, by Emmeline Dean, gives us the aged cardinal, a year before his death in 1890, in cardinalatial house cassock and walking stick. Between those two portraits lies a spiritual and intellectual pilgrimage within Catholicism that, combined with Newman’s pre-Catholic journey from evangelicalism to high-church Anglicanism and the Oxford Movement, remains one of the most compelling such tales of modern times—a path the Church has now officially recognized one marled by heroic virtue, miraculously attested.

The times being what they are, it was inevitable that gay activists and their allies among progressive Catholics would try to claim Newman as a patron-saint of gayness, citing letters he exchanged with his longtime friend Ambrose St. John, with whom he asked to be buried. As the pre-eminent Newman biographer, Father Ian Ker, pointed out, however, suggestions that Newman and St. John were homosexually involved (even if in a non-carnal way) testify to the ignorance that our culture exhibits about deep friendships, especially deep male friendships. He might have added that letters between such friends written in a 19th century literary style ought not be scrutinized through the foggy lens of twenty-first century homoeroticism, which saturates everything from Abercrombie & Fitch ads to prime-time banter these days.

These crude efforts to recruit a holy man to a dubious cause are a distraction from measuring Newman’s greatness as a thinker, writer, and preacher—a man who anticipated the Second Vatican Council in his own navigations through the whitewater of Catholicism’s encounter with intellectual modernity. Newman was also ecumenically prescient, if not in precisely the way that some ecumenists would celebrate. He left the Church of England for Rome when he could no longer accept Anglicanism’s claims to be apostolically grounded. And as the recent travails of the Anglican Communion have demonstrated, Newman was right, if ahead of his time, in recognizing that Christian communities untethered from apostolic tradition inevitably end up inventing do-it-yourself Christianity, taking their cues from the ambient culture of the day.

I once had the honor of spending time in Newman’s rooms at the Birmingham Oratory, which are much as the aged cardinal left them at his death in 1890. Over the altar, which occupies one side of the room, are tacked-up notes by which Cardinal Newman reminded himself of those for whom he had promised to pray. In the sitting room, a tattered newspaper map, also tacked to a wall, bears silent testimony to Newman’s interest in Kitchener’s efforts to lift the siege of Khartoum and rescue General Gordon from the Mahdi, a 19th century jihadist (Gordon died with Newman’s poem, “The Dream of Gerontius,” in his pocket). Perhaps most touching are Newman’s Latin breviaries, which he began to use as an Anglican, causing much controversy about such popish practices.

It is as a man of faith that the Church beatified John Henry Newman, however: the kind of man of faith who could write the following (which I take from another prayer card I’ve had for years, given me by Catholic Worker artist Ade Bethune):

God has created me to do him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught…Therefore I will trust Him, whatever I am…He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me—still, He knows what He is about.

Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us and for the unity in truth of Christ’s Church.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Is it increased tolerance or mere indifference that allowed Labour to elect a Jewish atheist as its new leader without any outcry?

In the welter of comment, analysis and psychobabble about Ed Miliband's victory and his brother's defeat I have yet to spot any mention of something which would once have been a big deal. Two actually.

There's a big feature in today's Times about the north London suburb of Dartmouth Park, which is really part of the slightly-better-known Tufnell Park, a stop on the Northern Line. Only last month I paid it my first visit in decades when my book club discussed Juan José Saer's novel, The Witness.

Eighteen months ago, we learn in the article, Ed Miliband and family moved into a four-storey 1860s house (big garden too) in Dartmouth Park. It's being billed as the new Islington. Glenda Jackson, the Kinnocks, writer Julian Barnes and all sorts of celebs I've never heard of apparently live there.

All of which will be fascinating to anyone living in north London – most of us don't, though north Londoners do not all realise that – as well as to estate agents and burglars.

As predicted here some tabloid attention has also been paid to the new Labour leader's marital status, partnered, not married to lawyer Justine Thornton, whose stern environmental letters occasionally appear in newspapers. With a second baby on the way I imagine the couple will quietly marry and that this time Ed will find time to get his name on the birth certificate.

But less attention is paid to other features of Labour's new leader's CV. He is an atheist, something which would have caused uproar barely a generation ago – and got an MP persecuted barely a century ago.

Neil Kinnock was, I think, the first major party leader to admit to being a non-believer, though Nick Clegg has since joined him in the club.

You can argue the toss either way on the wisdom or propriety of that declaration. Ex-MP Matthew Parris once recalled how when he was keen to out himself as gay his then chief whip said: "Look, I don't believe in God, but I don't go around telling people." Parris likes to quote Disraeli. "All wise men believe the same thing about God." What's that? "Wise men never say."

That's not actually true. Plenty of wise men down the ages, including our own, believe in God. But Dizzy was a made-for-TV Tory leader who couldn't help himself sometimes. Which leads me to the other little-remarked detail. Like Dizzy, by heritage young Ed is Jewish.

Yes, I know Disraeli's bookish father converted to Anglicanism in those prejudiced times when a Rothschild fought for years to take his seat as Britain's first avowedly Jewish MP. But you know what I mean.

Ed M says he does not believe in a deity, so he's an atheist. But he's a Jewish atheist because none of us escape the culture, national and family environment in which we are raised. As I never tire of saying, America is a profoundly Protestant country – Martin Luther's most enduring achievement – so even its Jews, Muslims and Catholics are Protestant Jews, Muslims and Catholics.

In the Miliband boys' case they were raised by bookish academic Marxist parents not far from Dartmouth Park in Primrose Hill.

Does any of this matter? It's a good subject for debate. I'd say yes, in all sorts of ways, though less than it did when faith was more central to British life than today, when it is still claimed by a majority in recent polls to mark the pope's visit, but more peripheral to Sunday than the weekly trip to St Sainsbury's.

In a globalised world, specific identity – Welsh, English, Cornish, African-Caribbean, etc – is important to many people, more so than years ago. Hence the plethora of cultural or geographical loyalties, the flags and symbols we all take for granted. Around the world, many integrated Jews, for example, became more Jewish because of the Holocaust and the realisation they could have died too.

With religion the trend has been the other way, albeit chiefly in Europe – where what Pope Benedict calls "aggressive atheism" is not so much conspicuous, as noisy. But is it really more about tolerance of diversity?

We saw this dramatically a few years ago when Iain Duncan Smith was elected Tory leader in 2001. A Catholic leading the Tory party! For Heaven's sake! But no one seemed to care much. I wrote an article pointing out that the Catholic Charles Kennedy led the Lib Dems and crypto-Catholic Tony Blair led Labour.

The three main parties were led by 2.5 Catholics in a country where Catholics were still banned from a few top posts – by law – notably from becoming King or Queen. Yet there was no fuss. There was no fuss when Michael Howard, Jewish by heritage and intermittent observance, became Tory leader.

This must be healthy – or is it? Catholic friends warned me at the time that "tolerance is the flip side of indifference".

Yet in the 60s John F Kennedy had a hard time running for president ("he'll be on the phone to the pope") and Leonard Wolf, widower of Virginia, insisted that Paul Johnson be made only probationary editor of the leftie New Statesman for the same reason.

In 2010 Muslims, facing hostile legal restrictions on mosques, dress and other manifestations of faith, in countries across Europe, would recognise that state of affairs. So would Jews who claim that Israel's unpopular policies have rubbed off on them.

In Manchester this week I interviewed Gerald Kaufman MP about his political journey from being a young Zionist (I'm still one, he insists) to becoming a vocal critic of Israeli aggression in the occupied territories. As such he occasionally gets abused in the synagogue he sometimes attends.

This ever-changing question of identity is complicated, isn't it? And it won't go away.

Benedict XVI strikes sombre note at celebrations, saying Catholics today pay a price in being 'dismissed and ridiculed'

In the gathering dusk, amid the floodlights and the candles, Pope Benedict XVI tonight told tens of thousands of Roman Catholics assembled in Hyde Park they too were suffering for their faith and compared them to the martyrs who were cruelly executed at nearby Tyburn. Their fate, he said, was not to be put to death but to be "dismissed out of hand, ridiculed or parodied".

His remarks sounded a sombre note in an otherwise joyful celebration of faith and fellowship with around 80,000 Catholics enjoying autumnal sunshine and a party atmosphere.

The pope said: "Not far from here, at Tyburn, great numbers of our brothers and sisters died for the faith. In our own time, the price to be paid for fidelity to the gospel is no longer being hanged, drawn and quartered, but it often involves being dismissed out of hand, ridiculed and parodied."

The pope warned, however, that "the church cannot withdraw from the task of proclaiming Christ and his gospel as saving truth, the source of our ultimate happiness as individuals and as the foundation of a just and humane society".

Benedict's comments echoed a central theme of his visit and, indeed, of his papacy – the marginalisation of Christianity in European public life.

The crowds were treated to a multi-cultural evening that reflected the racial diversity of London that Cardinal Walter Kasper claimed he was referring to when he said that landing at Heathrow was like arriving in a "Third World" country. There was a Swahili hymn and one, We Are Marching, that was translated from Afrikaans.

There were hymns, too, from West Cameroon in addition to more traditional fare, such as the Litany of the Sacred Heart and a hymn, Lead, Kindly Light, by Cardinal John Henry Newman. Today's event was a prayer vigil in preparation for tomorrow's mass at Cofton Park in Birmingham at which Newman, who converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism, will be beatified, moving one step closer to sainthood.

It will be the first beatification ever to be performed in this country and the first by Benedict, who has until now limited himself to taking part only in the canonisation of saints.

This backdrop of sanctity and symbolism did not get in the way of the organisers calling on the talents of television number cruncher Carol Vorderman and a finalist from a reality TV talent show, Liam McNally. The vigil gave Catholics a rare opportunity to dominate the Saturday evening television schedules. Performers were told to avoid wearing white clothes, stripes or prints because the cameras would react badly to them.

The pilgrims used social networking and rolling news channels to express their happiness at being at the event. Early estimates put the numbers in Hyde Park at around 80,000. The 83-year-old pope arrived in Hyde Park from a Catholic-run residence for the elderly, where he made a rare allusion to his own advanced age and the problems – and benefits – it brought him.

He said: "I come among you not only as a father, but also as a brother who knows well the joys and struggles that come with age. Our long years of life afford us the opportunity to appreciate both the beauty of God's greatest gift to us, the gift of life, as well as the fragility of the human spirit."

The pope added: "As the normal span of our lives increases, our physical capacities are often diminished; and yet these times may well be among the most spiritually fruitful years of our lives."

Benedict said it was important that the growing number of older people in society was seen as a blessing. "Every generation can learn from the experience and wisdom of the generation that preceded it. Indeed, the provision of care for the elderly should be considered not so much an act of generosity as the repayment of a debt of gratitude."

Between his main morning engagement – a mass in Westminster Cathedral – and his visit to the residence, there was a long gap in his itinerary that encouraged speculation he might be using it to meet some of the victims of sex abuse by priests that has dragged his church into its most serious crisis in modern times.

His spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said the pope was happy with the way the visit had gone so far, but added that Benedict had always been optimistic.

"We know that there are groups that have criticism for the pope and the Catholic church and that they have the right and the freedom to express it," he said.

"But we try always to have a general evaluation of the situation. And in this sense, I think that we recognize the reality is there is a very, very large audience that is very happy to meet the pope and express a great joy. I am very happy about the visit in general."

Everything about modern Anglicanism bears the marks of Cardinal Newman's teaching

Sunday's beatification of the Victorian intellectual John Henry Newman sets an unlikely candidate on the road to sainthood. "I have no tendency to be a saint – it is a sad thing to say so," he once wrote. "Saints are not literary men, they do not love the classics, they do not write tales." Melancholic, thin-skinned, a possessive friend, he nevertheless inspired ardent devotion. His Oxford Anglican preaching entranced a generation with what Matthew Arnold called "a religious music – subtle, sweet, mournful". Undergraduates copied even his oddities, like his habit of kneeling abruptly as if his knees had given way.

But it is Newman the writer who matters. Years ago, the English Catholic bishops attempted to have him declared a doctor (teacher) of the church, bypassing canonisation altogether. Newman was a sublime prose stylist and a scholar soaked in the Greek and Latin Fathers. Between 1833 and 1845 he transformed the Church of England, persuading its clergy that it was no mere department of state for moral uplift, but the English branch of the ancient Catholic church, through its sacraments and apostolic teaching a means of encounter with God. Everything about modern Anglicanism, from the look of its buildings to its theology and forms of worship, bears the marks of his teaching.

But he did not persuade himself. In 1845 he converted to Catholicism, and a second career as a priest in Birmingham. It was an uncomfortable translation. European Catholicism was in reaction, the pope besieged in an aggressively secular Italy, the church's monopoly over education and morals challenged everywhere by the rise of liberal democracies. Pius IX responded by cranking up the claims of the papacy and denouncing the secular world – egged on by what Newman called "an aggressive and insolent faction", who made unquestioning obedience to hyper-orthodoxy the sole test of Catholicism. Newman shared the pope's detestation of secularism, but deplored Rome's suppression of intellectual freedom: "Truth," he wrote, "is wrought out by many minds, working together freely." He came to be viewed in the Vatican as "the most dangerous man in England".

Newman worked doggedly on, promoting lay education to offset clericalism, writing to equip Catholicism to meet unprecedented intellectual challenges. His Essay on the Development of Doctrine was the first attempt to reconcile Christianity's claim to teach timeless truths with its immersion in the flux of history. Characteristically, he was untroubled by Darwin, willing to "go the whole hog" on evolution. His Grammar of Assent, exploring the processes by which the mind reaches certainty, is considered by the philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny the most enduring contribution to epistemology between Descartes and Wittgenstein. His Apologia Pro Vita Sua, one of the greatest spiritual autobiographies, re-established him overnight as one of the giants of Victorian England. In 1879 a new and more liberal pope recognised his stature by making him a cardinal.

Newman's thought came into its own in the 20th century, influencing, among others, the young Joseph Ratzinger, ironically enough, since Pope Benedict's understanding of papacy is not a million miles from that which Newman deplored. Yet the beatification ratifies Newman's distinctively English (and Anglican) formation. To that extent, it is an ecumenical act. It also affirms Newman's lifelong struggle to combine intellectual integrity with the surrender of heart and mind to a God he experienced both as love and truth. For a church whose claims to integrity, love and truth are currently taking a battering, that's a candle in the dark.

Pope Benedict XVI plans on Sunday during his state visit to Britain to beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman, who converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism.

Victorian academic who will be beatified by Benedict this Sunday was a troubled and conflicted character

At first sight it might seem strange that Pope Benedict XVI should come to Britain with the specific purpose of nudging towards sanctity a man who died 120 years ago and spent a large part of his adult life sequestered, first behind the walls of Oxford colleges and latterly at an oratory for Roman Catholic priests in Birmingham.

But John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was no ordinary Catholic. He has claims to being the most influential and revered English-speaking religious thinker and spiritual writer since the Reformation.

Whether he was also worthy of sainthood is another matter. He himself did not think so: "I have no tendency to be a saint," he wrote. "It is a sad thing to say so. Saints are not literary men."Well, he would say that since, say his critics, sainthood is not exactly something you can lobby for. And he is not there yet: the beatification that will take place in Birmingham this Sunday is the penultimate stage in the process.

At least one more miracle will be required in Newman's name before the Vatican's quaint and labyrinthine investigation is complete, though there are many in the English-speaking Roman Catholic world who want him to become the first post-Reformation English saint. Benedict himself is a fan.

In all this, Newman's faults tend to be glossed over. Essentially a donnish intellectual, he caused scandal in early-Victorian England for resigning as vicar of Oxford's University Church of St Mary and becoming a member of what was then widely regarded as an alien and superstitious, hostile religion, subversive and treacherous to every instinct of true-born Englishmen.

It was an act of no small courage, costing him his career and reputation within Anglicanism – the Oxford Movement, of which he was a part, nearly split the Church of England. Some of his family never spoke to him again. But Newman was also a polemicist, sometimes petty and disputatious, tenacious in his feuds and profoundly possessive of his friends. He may also have been gay.

"Newman is being beautified as much as beatified," said the Catholic writer John Cornwell, Newman's latest biographer. "He is right about literary men not making saints: we're self-absorbed, vain and egotistical, aren't we?"

And Newman could write like a dream, albeit in a high Victorian style. He is accessible and he's still read today, not least by educated, English-speaking Catholics, an important audience for the Vatican to keep on side. If anything, he is even better known in the US, where Newman clubs are scattered across campuses.

Frank Turner, a professor at Yale and another Newman biographer, said: "I think his is the popularity of the convert. He showed you could move from being an Anglican to become a Catholic and justify it intellectually. And, of course, he was a 'non-ethnic' Catholic, an Anglo-Saxon, not from the Irish or Italian ghettos.

"Would I have liked to meet him? Well, he could be very charming if you did not disagree with him."

His writing is subtle enough also for both sides of the Catholic church to feel comfortable with him. Liberals can feel he's really one of them with his ecclesiology and suspicion of papal authority. His most famous aphorism: "I shall drink to the Pope, if you please – still, to conscience first and to the Pope afterwards," reassures them, placing informed individual rational thought ahead of blind obedience.

Less well known is that the quote comes at the end of Newman's public letter to the Duke of Norfolk, England's most senior lay Catholic, which accepts papal infallibility but with the tacit assurance that an English aristocrat need not be too troubled by it. The duke subsequently lobbied for Newman to be made a cardinal.

At the same time, conservatives can reassure themselves that Newman is really one of them: a firm supporter of the one true faith and of obedience to the church. It is they who have lobbied most vehemently for his canonisation. They have also tended to round strongly on Newman's critics. Turner found his book vilified when he argued that Newman's most famous work, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (A Defence of One's Life), an account of his spiritual journey and conversion, may not have been entirely accurate.

Turner also raised the question of whether Newman was a homosexual, though concluding there is no evidence that he was. In an era when men wrote fulsomely to each other, Newman's letters can cloy to modern audiences who assume all relationships must be physical. He surrounded himself with a sometimes camp high church culture and could be rancorous and censorious when friends got married. Most famously, he insisted on being buried beside his friend Ambrose St John: "I was his first and last … from the very first he loved me with an intensity … which was unaccountable."

Newman's critics suggest a better candidate for sainthood would be Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, his contemporary and bitter rival, also a convert, but one who was both well-connected in society and well-known among the poor. Famously, Manning played a part in ending the 1889 London dock strike and was actively concerned with social issues. But he lacked Newman's charm – photographs show a pinched, censorious figure in contrast to Newman's ethereal, gentle smile – and he lacks polemical champions.

Newman remains elusive, never more so than when his grave was opened in 2008 so his body could be transferred to his old church, the Birmingham Oratory, in preparation for the pope's visit. The body was found to have entirely disintegrated: the old boy having craftily attempted to evade sanctification by arranging to be buried in rotting compost. Nevertheless, he'll be thrust back into the limelight once more on Sunday.

From the Vatican's perspective, the most important person whom Pope Benedict will see has been dead for 120 years

For a glimpse of what Pope Benedict is really up to in Britain you could do worse than start with the Glasgow-based Herald's recent interview with Monsignor Guido Marini, the Vatican official who stage-manages his religious services.

He confirmed a rumour that had been circulating for some weeks: that Benedict would be using the trip to Britain to step up the use of Latin. The Canon – the Eucharistic core – of all the services would be in Latin, as would the Preface, Monsignor Marini said.

At this point, I need to make what Italians call a precisazione. We are not talking here about the old, Tridentine rite that was used before the Second Vatican Council. The pope will be using the Latin version of the 'new' mass that was brought after the Council in the late 1960s and which normally said in the vernacular (i.e. English in Britain).

But why?

The Herald asked Monsignor Peter Smith, the Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Glasgow and one of the organisers of the Pope's mass at Bellahouston. He was quoted as saying

"The Vatican made it clear they wanted the Pope to say some of the Glasgow Mass in Latin because there will be a live TV and internet feed from Bellahouston beamed to a global audience of one billion and they wanted the people of the world to be able to join in. The universal language of the church is Latin."

Indeed, it is. But I suspect that if you were to take a poll of that same global audience you would find rather more would understand the pope's words if he were to say them in English instead of Latin.

No doubt Monsignor Smith is faithfully relaying what was said to him. But it is hard to credit this as the only reason, and indeed Monsignor Marini said something significantly different. The pope wanted to emphasise not only the universality, but "the continuity of the Church."

That is more like it – the authentic ring of nostalgic, Ratzingerian Catholicism. As the Catholic News Service noted a few days later, the liturgy to be used in Britain represents the latest stage in a steady progression. When he visited the United States in 2008, Benedict used English at both the big public masses, in New York and Washington. But by the time he got to Portugal in May he was using Latin consistently.

You might think the pope would put the brakes on in Britain with its famously secular bias and a Catholic laity and hierarchy often held to be unusually progressive. That, however, is to misunderstand the Vatican's take on Britain. One of Archbishop Vincent Nichols's advisers called it a hedonistic and selfish wasteland. But Rome long ago resigned itself to men and women of faith being in a minority in European states. What Benedict wants is for the Catholic church to be a "creative minority" of fervent (and theologically conservative) believers. And from that standpoint Britain looks really attractive.

For a start, you have a substantial number of British Catholics who are not progressive at all. Just look at the BBC's recent poll in which "Nearly half thought he should drop his insistence on clerical celibacy".

Well, nearly half is a very low percentage when compared to other countries. Fourteen long years ago, an American poll found that in every developed country it surveyed (it left out Britain), a majority of the Catholic population favoured having married priests. The only country with a percentage lower than the 49 per cent of today's British Catholics was in the Philippines.

The other point is, of course, that Britain holds out the potential for conversions en bloc of disgruntled, traditionalist members of another denomination. That would be no small event in a papacy that has as its central aim the laying of the foundations for a re-evangelisation of Europe.

It is against this background that the beatification of Cardinal Newman, who converted from Anglicanism, needs to be seen. I get the impression many people in Britain do not realise just how big a fuss the Vatican is making of it. It will be the first beatification to be carried out by Benedict, and the first ever on British soil. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that, for the Vatican, the meeting with the Queen and all the rest is incidental. In Vatican documents (here, for example), Benedict's visit is described as the Apostolic Voyage of His Holiness to the United Kingdom "on the occasion of the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman".

I think they make themselves pretty clear. No?

Benedict XVI is no Pope Palpatine, but he is far too prepared to ask hard choices of other vulnerable people

There are a lot of reasons why one might choose to become, or remain, a member of the Catholic church.

Having converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism as an adult, Ann Widdecombe was drawn to it specifically because of the hierarchy's opposition to female ordination, and more generally because the church is authoritarian, unchanging and unbending. Like most of us, she creates and chooses a set of spiritual beliefs which reflect the cast of her own mind in more mundane affairs. This isn't to discount in her an element of "harsh but fair" which leads her to be as hard in her demands on herself as she is on others.

What I don't find in her piece of September 7 is simple pleasure in the comfort religion of shared worship and ritual, Catholicism as a lived daily experience. You don't get a sense that she blisses out saying the Rosary, or doing the Stations of the Cross, or exchanging handshakes and hugs with fellow worshippers. Indeed, a majority of those fellow-worshippers – going from a BBC poll for "Sunday" – don't actually share a lot of her views: they think the church undervalues women, for example, and was not concerned enough with victims of clerical abuse as opposed to the reputation of the church.

I left the church primarily because I ceased to have faith in anything readily identifiable as God, and in the notion of any single privileged route of communication with God in the shape of revelation. The historical crimes of Catholicism – and of all other religions known to me – were a factor in this, as was the fact that my sexuality and gender identity were regarded by the likes of the future Pope Benedict as intrinsic moral disorders and a threat to the human environment as grave as that posed by the destruction of the rain forest.

Yet there is a Catholicism I used to be part of, and miss – a Catholicism of solidarity with the people on each side of you when you kneel to receive Communion, a Catholicism of social action which schoolfriends who stayed believers have given their lives to. As Widdecombe rightly says, some Catholic charities have done immense good in the Third World; as she does not say, they have often done this by ignoring the hierarchy's strictures on condoms and alliance with radical social forces.

The trouble with being a convert is that you turn up in the middle of a conversation and lack a certain sense of who's talking and what they already said. Ann Widdecombe – like quite a lot of atheists, ironically – significantly overvalues the role of Pope Benedict in the spiritual life of ordinary decent Catholics.

One of the problems with Pope Benedict is that he believes that the capacity of the church to do good in the world is to a significant extend dependent on its being what believers like Ann Widdecombe want it to be. He has argued that the authority of the church depends in its not ever acknowledging more than it has to any mistakes it has made in the past.. And he is too in love with the glamour of his role as its head; the Shoes of the Fisherman should never come from Prada.

In the face of the church's struggle against godless communism, he, like his predecessor, was too prepared to condone the excesses of his allies among the military juntas of Latin America, just as Pius XII – whom Benedict wishes to have declared a saint – soft-pedalled open condemnation of Nazi anti-semitism, whatever private efforts may have been made to save individual victims. It could be argued that Benedict has taken Jesus' pun about Peter, the rock on which he would build his church, too literally. He values the hardness and stability of stone even of heartlessness.

The more I think about Benedict the less I think of him as a wicked man, the Pope Palpatine – after the evil Emperor from Star Wars – of much internet chatter. I think he is a clever man who overvalues intellectual constructs at the expense of imaginative sympathy, and is too prepared as a result to trade an abstract good for a concrete one, to regard some consequences as sacrifices worth making for that greater abstract good.

The unchanging authority of the church is a scrap of rag compared to the miserable death of a wife infected with HIV through having unprotected sex with the husband whom she feels obliged to obey. It is dust beside the shame of a child raped by a priest and told to shut up about it, or a man tortured with cattleprods and Alsatians by the secular opponents of liberation theology. Benedict, who as a youth who could have refused to serve the Third Reich but asked that the cup of martyrdom pass him by, is far too prepared to ask hard choices of other vulnerable people.

He is a flawed busybody who has done more harm than good in the world. I, unlike Ann Widdecombe, will not welcome him.

Help! I just can't stop making money! But my friends accuse me of giving banking a bad name. How can I prove them wrong (and double my money too)?

Dear Dr Mander

I'll bet you can't guess what my problem is. Actually, let's make it interesting, I'll bet you a billion pounds of taxpayers' money you can't guess. No? OK, let's try it this way. You stake me a billion pounds, I'll use the money to buy a load of junk paper, which I'll cut up into tiny pieces and sell to a bunch of fund managers. But to make our investment safe, I'll bundle the scraps of rubbish paper in with real bank notes. Then I'll borrow more money, using the bundles of worthless trash and real money as collateral. Then we reinvest in more junk. Brilliant.

Sorry, I got side-tracked. The thing is, I've had a hugely successful career in finance and I've just been given the top job of running a bank with a big high street name. No-brainer, huh? But people say I'm just a casino croupier and that I give banking a bad name. How do I prove them wrong (and double my money at the same time)?

B Diamond

Dear Mr Diamond

Many compulsive gamblers suffer from chronic low self-esteem and are driven not by the desire to win, but by the unconscious urge to lose. The thrill of risking everything gives them a potent, but transient illusion of control over their lives, while also abdicating responsibility for the future. The pain of loss reinforces the gambler's belief in his worthlessness, locking him in a cycle of risk-taking and humiliation.

Your problem would seem to be that you are too good at gambling. By failing to lose, you have made yourself rich and, as a result, people expect you to behave responsibly. Get down to Ladbrokes, drink several cans of strong lager and blow your entire fortune. Then you will be fully qualified to run a major UK bank.

Dear Dr Mander

They call me the Holy Father because I run the daddy of all Churches. We're a global franchise with outlets in every country of the world. We've had some branding problems of late. It's fair to say that ethical standards slipped among a few of our junior sales executives. There have been some presentational lapses at middle-management level. But there are still great opportunities for growth. I'm leading a marketing drive in the UK this week. Anglicanism – the local product – isn't flying off the shelves and I'm sure there are a lot of consumers who would like our unique blend of closed hierarchy and reactionary dogma. How do you think I should pitch it?

J "Benny" Ratzinger

Dear Mr Ratzinger

Although you have many customers already in the UK, you are competing in a dwindling market of old-fashioned, traditionalist believers. True, you will poach some of these from the Church of England. But the real growth potential is in nonconformists, evangelicals, cults, sects and random zealots. They have, in marketing terms, a kind of insurgent appeal over more established names. Your big state visit reeks of the old top-down approach, when today it's all about the grassroots, social networking and radical messages that go viral. Take the example of Florida's Dove World Outreach Centre church. Who had heard of it before the local pastor said he'd burn a Qur'an? He may be a small-time fanatic, but he sure knocked you off the front pages.

Dear Dr Mander

Some things I have read in the newspapers recently have led me to suspect that my husband might possibly be having an affair. He says he wants to be with me, but I'm finding it hard to trust him.

C Rooney (née McLoughlin)

Dear Ms Rooney

Most newspaper stories, as everyone knows, are driven by envy of more successful media rivals and a partisan political agenda against the government. I'm sure your husband is entirely blameless.

Dr Gerry Mander shares his consulting room with Rafael Behr