Caravaggio’s farewell

Caravaggio’s farewell

Is there a banner under which Catholics can unite and which would appeal to all people of goodwill? 75 years after the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a subtly ambitious new Vatican document threads together a seamless defence of the inalienable dignity of every human person. It declares that children living in poverty, refugees and asylum seekers, families whose homes have been destroyed by war, people outlawed and persecuted because of their sexuality, women who are trafficked or attacked by their partners, and young people and vulnerable adults who have been sexually abused are as much a core concern of the Church as those who are at the end of life or who are unborn. As Austen Ivereigh writes in his analysis in this week’s edition, Dignitas Infinita neatly captures the ways in which Pope Francis has brought together all those whose dignity is threatened in today’s world. “Every human life is precious” isn’t a bad masthead for a Church that shares the general human propensity to be forgetful about the things that really matter. 

In the same week that the doctor who led the review into children’s gender services in England lamented the “increasingly toxic, ideological and polarised public debate” around transgender issues it was not surprising that Dignitas Infinita’s relatively brief excursus into sex-change therapies (“Any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception”) made the headlines. As Michael Sean Winters reports on our news pages, Dignitas Infinita repeats Pope Francis’ opposition to any ideology that seeks to deny sexual differences between men and women. “Regarding gender theory, whose scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts, the Church recalls that human life in all its dimensions, both physical and spiritual, is a gift from God,” it declares. “This gift is to be accepted with gratitude and placed at the service of the good. Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.” It adds later, “All attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected.” The chair of the Irish bishops’ Council for Life, Bishop Kevin Doran of Elphin, welcomed the document for making it clear that human dignity is not something that is given or conceded by law, reports Sarah Mac Donald. “Children and young people who believe they were born into the wrong gender need loving, non-partisan care to protect their dignity,” Bishop Doran said.

In her interview with Hannah Barnes last week, Maggie Fergusson heard that the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs had left some children with “a lifetime of damage”. When a troubled young person seeks help, some clinicians have promptly reached for puberty blockers, with often devastating consequences. But others have responded, to the exclusion of all other possibilities, that trans people do not exist. In Dignitas Infinita the Church is trying to protect children from the kind of hurried medical invention that, as Hilary Cass’s landmark review confirmed yesterday, has let many children down. But in our leader this week we suggest that in its apparent dismissal of the possibility that an individual may have a gender identity different from the one, as the saying goes, “assigned at birth”, the authors of Dignitas Infinita should have been more cautious. The Church once confidently asserted that homosexuality didn’t really exist: it was a delusion, a moral failing or a mental illness. We have learnt that being gay is a regularly occurring non-pathological minority variant in the human condition. There is a danger that in approaching a transgendered person the Church will repeat the mistake of seeing not the face of a human being in front of them but an individual who must be either deluded, sinful or mentally ill. And thereby forget its own admirable teaching: “Every life is precious.”

“It used to be that only cynical old Vaticanisti like your correspondent,” Paddy Agnew writes in View from Rome, “would publicly dare to suggest that, when it comes to conclaves, the Holy Spirit is not the only electoral protagonist. Times change and even the Holy Father himself says it now.”  In a book-length interview about his relationship with his predecessor, Pope Francis has spilled the beans about the plots and manoeuvres at the 2005 and 2013 papal elections. Though the beans were all spilled several years ago, the difference is that the person scraping the tin now is Francis himself, who as pope is freed from his cardinal’s oath of secrecy. There is something refreshingly human and unsaintly about Francis’ candid annoyance at the behaviour of the “unscrupulous” people close to Pope Emeritus Benedict, who manufactured controversies that hurt both Popes. And as Paddy tells us, he points a sharp finger at one individual in particular: Benedict's long-time papal secretary, also head of his own papal household, Georg Gänswein, “Gorgeous Georg”, whom he fired and then exiled from the Vatican.

Speaking at Stonyhurst on Good Friday, Timothy Radcliffe, the Dominican friar whose retreat talks and interventions during the Synod gathering in Rome last October were seen by many delegates as its spiritual underpinning, reflected on how this process of listening and discernment is also a sort of death so that we might live, in preparation for a new springtime in the Church. Ten years ago, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from a school in Chibok. Around a hundred are still missing. Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani reports that the survivors are trying to rebuild their lives in ways that sometimes trouble their families and the community. Tobias Jones, the writer and creator of experimental communities in Somerset and northern Italy, tells Peter Stanford that he has become more comfortable about talking about the religious faith that underpinned them. 

Joanna Moorhead heads to Naples to investigate the story behind what turned out to be Caravaggio’s final commission, The Martyrdom of St Ursula, our cover illustration this week and the focus of the National Gallery’s new exhibition. Isabelle Grey sits through two nun-focused horror films: Immaculate opens promisingly but withers away; The First Omen is “strong and absorbing” and delivers a satisfying surprise twist at the end. Mark Lawson is gripped by American dramatist Paul Grellong’s Harvard-set Power of Sail, a “moral thriller” with “both intelligence and tension”. And Lucy Lethbridge is captivated by the black-and-white portrayal of Tom Ripley in the new Netflix drama series starring Andrew Scott. 

In Books, Nicholas King is intrigued by Candida Moss’s God’s Ghostwriters, a belated recognition of the profound influence of the “enslaved persons” who contributed to the creation of the New Testament. Noonie Minogue is “weirdly thrilled” by the view Colin Elliott’s Pox Romana gives us of Roman civilisation’s disease-ridden collapse into violence and paranoid lunacy. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation pins the increase in mental-health problems in young people on the emergence of social media; Felicity Hudson suggests the crisis is deeper and murkier. And Lindsay Duguid is entertained and unsettled by Andrew O’Hagan’s novel set in contemporary north London, Caledonian Road. 

There are seven pages of news stories from our correspondents in Britain, Ireland and across the world as usual, and updates and new stories are added to our website several times a day, giving readers an unrivalled overview of what is happening in the Church in Britain, Ireland and across the world.  “We are certainly living in changing times,” Archbishop Francis Duffy of Tuam acknowledged yesterday. Sarah Mac Donald reports on a series of reshuffles and mergers some have described as the most far-reaching reconfiguration of the Church in Ireland since the twelfth century. Brian Morton reports from Scotland that there was profound shock when it was learnt that Fr Martin Chambers had died suddenly, just 17 days before he was due to be installed as the new bishop of Dunkeld in St Andrew's cathedral, Dundee. The Diocese of Clifton has denied that the resignation of Bishop Declan Lang is connected with the recent cancellation of the consecration of one of the diocese’s priests as bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Plymouth; Catherine Pepinster untangles the story. Trócaire has welcomed the temporary reopening of the Erez Gate in northern Gaza for the delivery of food aid to the region, while warning that without urgent action Palestinians there face famine. Mahmoud Shalabi, programme director of Trócaire’s partner in Gaza Medical Aid for Palestinians, accused the Israeli government of “using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza”. Sarah Mac Donald reports. And Bess Twiston Davies writes that research from the diocese of East Anglia indicates that “spiritual restlessness” is driving adults to join the Catholic Church. 

Tom Heneghan reports that when it was told that a nun expelled from a traditionalist group’s abbey had been left without means or lodging, a French civil court ordered Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the former head of the Dicastery for Bishops, to pay Mother Marie Ferréol more than £200,000 in damages. Personal differences and clashing interpretations of Thomist writings are reportedly behind the dispute between the Ferréol and her equally strong-willed superior. And preachers and theologians from North America, Europe and Asia have asked the Church to change canon law to allow qualified lay preachers to preach the homily at Mass to “reflect a synodal Church more fully”, writes Sophia Rayzan. 

This month we have three webinars in which experts introduce the ways in which Catholicism has influenced art, music and literature. We began yesterday evening with an exhilarating picture show presented by the priest and former Sotheby’s auctioneer Patrick van der Vorst; next week, 17 April, Stephanie MacGillivray will discuss music and on 24 April the poet Sally Read will speak about literature. On 18 April, the Pastoral Review team presents a webinar on Catholics and the general election with Raymond Friel, Clifford Longley, Anna Rowlands and Jenny Sinclair. Full details of timings, speakers and tickets for all our events and webinars are available here. 

When a letter begins, “In your otherwise perceptive editorial …” you know you’re in for a kicking. John McHugo duly delivers. In Letters this week, readers applaud and decry our position on the wars in Gaza and the Ukraine, gender theory, child poverty, the synodal process and private schools. Christopher Howse is unhappy about the shunting of a Friday night smorgasbord of light music played by a resident orchestra from Radio 2 to Radio 3 (“What next? Sing Something Simple?”). Finally, nature-lover Jonathan Tulloch spots the remains of an ancient picnic and Rose Prince laments a petty new government measure that will increase the price of roquefort, mozzarella, manchego, halloumi and other French, Italian, Spanish and Greek cheeses and offers a consoling recipe for spanakopita, a spinach and feta cheese pie. 

“Thanks to my sponsor I am now able to drink from the stream again,” Sri Lankan Sister Concelia Mariampillai writes in this week’s appeal for our development fund. “I love The Tablet, and I wanted to share it with friends,” Sydney Xavier explains. If you are able to sponsor a missionary’s subscription or contribute to our development fund, there are details here.  If you are not a subscriber but would like to give us a trial, you can try five issues for £5 and get a free copy of a book by Pope Benedict XVI or by Timothy Radcliffe by visiting checkout.thetablet.co.uk/MTABBL24 or calling 01858 438736 quoting promotional code MTABBL24.

I hope you enjoy this week’s Tablet. 

Brendan Walsh
Editor of The Tablet