THE TABLET
THE INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC WEEKLY FOUNDED IN 1840
CARDINAL SARAH’S LETTER
WANTED:
NEW KINDS OF
PRIESTS
The coronavirus pandemic, deadly though it is, has taught humanity many lessons, not least the importance for human wellbeing of connectedness and interdependence. Zoom, Team, Hangout, Skype and so on are valuable software tools for communication and interaction. But they lack something – the “real presence” of other people, for which there is no substitute. And there is a close parallel here to the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, especially in the celebration of Mass. Catholics the world over have felt the absence of that sense of closeness to God that comes from being actually and really present. It affects and deepens the experience of prayer in mysterious ways. Watching a screen is not the same as being there.
This is a theological point borne out by guidance issued by Cardinal Robert Sarah, the Vatican’s senior liturgical authority, on the importance of returning as soon as possible to the normal practice of Sunday Mass attendance. He acknowledges the value of Masses and other services being streamed over the internet, but as soon as circumstances permit, he says, “it is necessary and urgent to return to the normality of Christian life, which has the church building as its home and the celebration of the liturgy, especially the Eucharist, as the summit towards which the activity of the Church is directed; and at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows.”
His letter to Catholic bishops follows the unsettling finding, in a poll by Catholic Voices reported in The
Tablet, that only 61 per cent of Catholics who were previously regular Mass attenders said they intended to resume that practice when it is possible to do so. That figure may represent a lingering fear of contracting or unwittingly transmitting the coronavirus. Present practice is for congregations at Mass to be much smaller in order for social distancing rules to be observed, and many parishes have been using an online booking system to keep numbers under control. This has meant that probably rather fewer than 61 per cent of practising Catholics have been able to keep up weekly attendance. If there was a 100 per cent return, while social distancing rules still applied, parishes would have to provide many more Masses and would quickly find that there were not enough priests to cope with the demand. Maybe the coronavirus is telling the Church something. Cardinal Sarah has reminded us of the vital importance of the “real presence” of the Eucharist. Might it follow that the pool from which new priests are recruited is too narrowly defined? Catholics in many parts of the world are already deprived of regular access to the Eucharist. It cannot be assumed that the coronavirus will one day go away. The Church may have to adapt to life where the virus’ continuing presence, and the resulting changes in human behaviour because of it, are the new normal. The Church must look again at the case for ordaining married men – and start to take more seriously the debate about ordaining women.
EU WITHDRAWAL
AGREEMENT
A PRIME MINISTER
IS NOT ABOVE THE LAW
When trouble is brewing at home, populist leaders sometimes find it useful to pick a fight with a foreign neighbour, to whip up patriotic feeling
and distract attention from domestic difficulties. This is one possible account of Boris Johnson’s motives for issuing a threat to disregard international law, on the pretext that the European Union side in the current trade negotiations was acting unreasonably and therefore in bad faith. But is he that calculating? It was clear from Monday’s House of Commons debate that the government’s position was full of holes.
The casus belli of this display of diplomatic belligerence was an alleged observation by an EU negotiator that countries outside the EU could only import food into it if they were on the list of countries whose food safety standards were the same as the EU’s or better. Britain certainly fits that criterion now, being still covered by those rules, but has not agreed a set of safety standards for when the rules no longer apply. This has raised suspicions that the UK wants to keep all its options open in trade negotiations with the United States, where standards are definitely lower.
The EU is naturally eager to keep American chlorinated chicken and hormone-fattened beef off the dinner plates of Dublin, not to mention Paris and Berlin. Such goods could enter EU territory, for instance, by being exported across the open border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, having first been ferried across from Great Britain. The EU’s desire to stop this would amount to what Johnson called a “blockade”. This would, he claimed,
be an “extreme” interpretation of the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement which he signed earlier this year. So he proposed a new law to override it.
This provoked an outcry from the more scrupulous members of his party, who felt – rightly – that Britain’s reputation for upholding international law was being trashed for no good reason. In any event, Johnson’s blockade threat looks utterly spurious as the only people able to enforce it would be the British themselves. The EU was never proposing to send warships to intercept blockade-running vessels in the Irish Sea. So the watching world will ask itself – who is really acting in bad faith here?
At least at this stage of the argument, Johnson’s tactics seem to have done the trick, as all but a few Tory MPs voted for the new law in principle. Whatever happens next, the damage has been done (and not least to the honour of the Conservative Party itself ). A deliberate intention to break international law has been declared; Britain can no longer criticise the Chinese, say, for breaking its treaty with regard to Hong Kong, nor indeed the Israeli government for the unlawful occupation of the West Bank. The best hope must be that the EU negotiating team will act as the adults in this dysfunctional relationship, and refuse to retaliate. A compromise on food safety standards can either be negotiated now or will emerge from the arbitration process which the treaty allows for. And so when the dust has settled, what will be left is a Britain that has recklessly thrown away its reputation for integrity – because of a prime minister who believes he is above the law.
2 | THE TABLET | 19 SEPTEMBER 2020
