It is a toss-up which issue will prove the tougher for President Barack Obama – United States health-care reform or West Bank settlements. Every United States administration since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war has acknowledged that Israeli settlements dotted over the West Bank landscape are a barrier to any peaceful solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has already been responsible for four wars. By any reading of international law, not to mention UN Security Council resolution 242, these settlements are illegal. Residents of the settlements have no entitlement to the land they are on, even in Israeli law. And the Palestinians know this too. About the only moral and legal argument in Israel’s favour is the mention in 242 of Israel’s right to exist within “secure and recognised boundaries”, and secure means defensible. The West Bank is in fact a salient, a bite out of the side of Israel on the map almost slicing it in two. It presents the defenders of Israel with severe strategic difficulties. That is why the issue of the settlements and the issue of a peace treaty are inseparable. Israel cannot hand land back to its sworn enemies.

Mr Obama’s administration is engaged in careful diplomatic talks with the Government led by Benjamin Netanyahu to bring about a freeze on further development in the settlements. That is only the first stage towards a solution, however, for even in peacetime the settlements cannot remain on Palestinian land. As Anshel Pfeffer writes on page 13, land swaps on or near the Israeli-Palestinian boundary are a conceivable answer to some settlements, but the more intractable problem lies deeper in the West Bank itself where many settlers are strongly motivated by religion and ideology. They are there because they think they have a God-given right to be; and because they want permanently to deprive the Palestinians of the land in question. Given that his Government depends on pro-settlement parties in his coalition, ...

One of Pope Benedict XVI’s most controversial initiatives has been his promotion of the Tridentine Rite of Mass as an alternative to the revised rite that reflects the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Archbishop Vincent Nichols, newly installed at Westminster, has lost little time in defusing some of the reasons for the controversy in a forthright message to priests taking part in a training conference on the Tridentine Rite later this month.

His message is unambiguous, and may not please some of those hoping to attend the conference. First, he has insisted that the training conference is officially sponsored by the Diocese of Westminster, “in conjunction with the Latin Mass Society”, thereby keeping it under his control. In church teaching and canon law, he states, bishops are responsible for the oversight of the liturgy. Many feel a bishop’s role in these matters has been undermined by Pope Benedict’s motu proprio “Summorum Pontificum”, which appears to allow priests to opt for the Tridentine Rite regardless of the attitude of local bishops.

Archbishop Nichol gives no shred of encouragement to those who want the Tridentine Rite to replace the newer version. Conference participants “will wholeheartedly celebrate the Mass in each of these forms”, he instructs them bluntly, adding: “The view that the ordinary form of the Mass, in itself, is in some way deficient finds no place here.” People who hold that view are “inexorably distancing themselves from the Church”, he says. There is no scope, in other words, for “Tridentine Rite” parishes that set themselves up in the spirit of being “more Catholic than thou”. Recognising the threat of such moves, Archbishop Nichols is seeking to nip a potential schism in the bud. His firm leadership in Westminster is one that other bishops in England and Wales – and elsewhere – will welcome. The Catholic Church ...

Authorities in Rome have indicated that they want next year’s beatification of John Henry Newman to be conducted in Birmingham, his adopted city. This is a challenge that raises deeper questions – what is the real significance of Newman’s life and work; what is it that should be celebrated? In Britain and elsewhere, Newman’s name is often invoked in support of various causes of the moment ...

Rwandan student Tindyebwa Agaba graduated this week from Exeter University with a 2:1 in politics, six years after he first arrived in Britain. His father had died of Aids, his mother and sister were missing, and after fleeing genocide in his own country, he lived rough in London. His life was transformed by two things: his own ambition and the support of his adoptive parents, the actors Emma Thompson and Greg Wise. ...

Family life in Britain is undoubtedly in crisis, and the breakdown of relationships has reached epidemic proportions. More marriages end in divorce than ever before, and an increasing proportion of the population has dispensed with weddings altogether, preferring the less publicly binding status of informal cohabitation. British Churches, the Catholic Church included, will therefore be sympathetic to the call from ...

Gordon Brown has manifestly not done enough to explain why British troops are dying in the dust and heat of Afghanistan, fighting an enemy whose aim seems to be the replacement of one corrupt Afghan regime by another. True, the Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda in the days when it first declared war-by-terrorism on Western civilisation and carried out the attacks in the United States on 9/11. It is equally true that the Taliban ...

Benedict XVI's new social encyclical will take an hon­oured place in the series of such documents dating back to Rerum Novarum in 1891. Caritas in Veritate will be instantly scanned for what it has to say about contemporary concerns, such as the credit crunch, global warming, mass migration and unemployment. But its real if less newsworthy significance is in its development of the tradition. Each social encyclical ...