Second Sight

Two weeks ago I speculated on some attitudes towards sexuality within the Church. And excellent and helpful comments ensued. But I was aware that I was confining myself to a relatively straightforward aspect: our recognition – with or without the Church’s help – of the ways in which sexuality could be used in an unloving fashion. Here I want to look at the knottier question of the intrinsic nature of human sexuality laid down by God.

Imagine for a moment that you are exploring the far corners of an attic in an old house, and that you come across a piece of machinery which you don’t recognise. It’s heavy, it has a handle to turn, and it has numbers that can be set and changed. By observation of how its parts work, and by experiment, you eventually discover that it is a mechanical calculator with which quite complex multiplication and division can be done. You now know what its maker designed it for. Of course, being an inanimate possession, you are free to use it as you wish – for its maker’s purpose perhaps, or as a curiosity to display, or an effective door stop.

Now transfer that example to sexuality. It doesn’t take a genius to work out in an analogous way the purpose of our sexual equipment. The biology shows clearly that it is structurally ordered toward the conception of new members of the species, and that the parts are fitted for congress between male and female. We may find further – with experience – that the sexual drive urges us towards congress, and so conception; and that it also has the tendency to bind the participants into a long term relationship which enables them to support each other in practical and psychological ways through the task of parenthood.

Here the analogy with the calculator breaks down. We are not objects which we possess and can dispose of as we wish. Our human nature is given to us by God, the divine maker. So we are obliged to use our sexuality according to the nature he gave us. And it pays us to do so because – as Aristotle said and Aquinas confirmed – in order for an entity to flourish it must work in accord with its nature.

This analysis of vice and virtue through physical nature has traditionally been given preeminence in moral theology. Thus, for example,  Aquinas says, “In every genus, worst of all is the corruption of the principle on which the rest depend. Now the principles of reason are those things that are according to nature, because reason presupposes things as determined by nature, before disposing of other things according as it is fitting…in matters of action it is most grave and shameful to act against things as determined by nature. Therefore, since by the unnatural vices man transgresses that which has been determined by nature with regard to the use of venereal actions, it follows that in this matter this sin is gravest of all.”

This does not refer merely to “venereal actions”, although this is where it is most frequently encountered. It applies for instance to physical mutilation, or to telling lies – where, if you take this approach, you are abusing the purpose of the God-given power of speech which no motivation, however compelling,  can excuse .

This deduction of intrinsic moral status from a primarily physical point of view still reflects the official position although its alleged shortcomings have made it increasingly unpopular. One reason is that its unconditionality leads to moral positions which are counterintuitive. For example, a strict application would forbid the donation of a kidney between living people; the Catechism makes it clear that not even the avoidance of grave injustice to a third party can justify a lie – although deceit can be used in other ways, and – the most topical example – the prohibition of condoms for a married couple who are serodiscordant.

A second reason for unpopularity is that the biological criterion of morality alone fails to do justice to the whole of human nature. This was more understandable in Aquinas’s day when we knew so little about the psychological aspects of the human being. So when we ask ourselves what course of action should we follow or avoid so that we can flourish in the way that God intended it is not surprising that the 21st century answer differs in some aspects from the 13th.

I certainly would not argue that physical biology is a useless guide. It will always be a strong indicator of the way in which we should behave. Thus the power of speech, needed for us to fulfil our natures as social beings, indicates that truth-telling is of the highest importance but not necessarily without the possibility of exceptions. The sexual organs still indicate that flourishing is best achieved through heterosexual behaviour linked to generation and the commitment of marriage.

Perhaps our focus should move away from looking at all the things which we get wrong, and be applied to the positive values. That way we speak to man’s aspirations rather than to his fears. What is historically certain is that our continued cataloguing of sexual sin has not led to more orthodox behaviour. But it has led to our ill repute, and our rejection in the market place. I will settle for John XXIII’s remarks at the beginning of the Council: “Nowadays, however, the spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity. She considers that she meets the needs of the present day by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnations…”

Were I to show you the skeleton of an adult humanoid creature, standing about 40 inches in height, and with the brain capacity of a chimpanzee, you might immediately think of “Lucy”, a member of the hominid family, Australopithecus, which lived some three million years ago. Were I to tell you that these remains are in fact dated to about 18,000 years ago and were recovered from a small Indonesian island called Flores, you might perhaps want to revise your guess. You would probably settle for a surviving descendant of homo erectus, who first emerged from Africa about two million years ago, and may have been a direct forebear of homo sapiens. Restricted to their small environment, their brain capacity may well have shrunk to half its original size, a phenomenon not unknown in isolated non-human populations. Alternatively, the lack of challenge in a very restricted and safe environment may not have provided the evolutionary need for the brain, and skull, to enlarge.

This would have been mystery enough. The discovery of homo floresiensis (to be swiftly nicknamed the “Hobbit”) in 2004 presented us with a creature who should have been extinct millions of years ago, but was in fact our contemporary throughout most of human history. Indeed, if local legends are true, it might have survived as late as the 16th century. While you could be right about homo erectus, for the theory has respectable champions, the latest information suggests otherwise.

The bones of the legs and the pelvis show Hobbit to be bipedal, a characteristic of the homo line. But the feet are disproportionately long and lack proper arches. These primitive traits suggest an awkward, high-stepping, gait. But the big toe is aligned and not splayed out as it would be in an Australopithecine. The trapezoid bone in the wrist is ape-like in shape, and so less suited to tool making and similar operations than the normal homo version.

The skull is simply a mixture. The brain it encased was about the size of a grapefruit, similar to a chimpanzee, yet it has the narrow nose, brow arches and small teeth which suggest the homo line. Interestingly, the brain would have had an enlarged area which is believed to be associated with complex cognitive skills. This might explain the Hobbit’s ability to manufacture relatively sophisticated stone tools for hunting, and indeed may have influenced our homo sapiens ancestors in this regard. And they also used fire for cooking.

So a theory is gaining ground that the Hobbit is a newly discovered branch on the homo line which emerged before, and perhaps well before, homo erectus. Until this point the oldest hominid who moved out from Africa was thought to be homo erectus, and its remains, dating from about 1.8 million years ago, have been found in Georgia. But the Hobbit suggests the possibility that the first members of the human family spread out from Africa, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before that, and survived until relatively modern times.

Tracing the hominid tree from the last ancestor we shared with the apes has always been a complex task. The separation took place about six mya (million years ago). The evidence is restricted to chance finds which have survived because conditions happened to have been conducive. And all too often these finds are no more than clues from which inferences have to be made. Nevertheless, broad patterns appear.

Perhaps the most telling of these is the increase in brain size. We first find this at an average of 450cc about 3.5 mya. By 2.5 mya (homo habilis) it has grown to 750cc, and at 2.5 mya, with the arrival of homo erectus, it has become 1000cc. At around 195,000 years ago, homo sapiens appears, with a brain capacity of 1330 cc.

There is a parallel pattern of apparent brain functionality. The first, and crude, stone tools appear at 2.5 mya, and the skill gradually develops to sophisticated blades and grinding stones about 100,000 years before homo sapiens (who will graduate to bronze tools about 95,000 years later, shortly before the first evidence of writing).

The use of fire, shared childcare, purpose-built shelters and cooking all appear before homo sapiens. And a report in December 2009 described the relics of sophisticated settlements (near the Dead Sea) dated to 750,000 years ago - half a million years earlier than we previously thought.

If we throw into the mix painted Neanderthal jewellery, made some 10,000 years before homo sapiens entered Europe, and take into account somewhat less secure evidence of burial practices, it becomes increasingly difficult to square the scientific evidence with the concept of the first ensouled hominids being members of our own species. By “ensouled” I mean with intelligence, a sense of right and wrong and a recognition of the sacred.

I am aware of the difficulty this causes with the concept of sin coming into the world through one man - which led to Pius XII to say: “Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual…” I do not pretend to reconcile the scientific evidence with the theological. I rest in the confidence that, when both are properly understood, they will be reconcilable. But you may well have a solution to give us on www.secondsightblog.com. I may return to this question in a future column.

Postscript. My friend Edmund Adamus points out that the view of the Congregation for the Clergy, quoted in my last column, that the faithful had no business advising the hierarchy, was shortly to be reversed by the 1983 revision of Canon Law. So thank you to him for refining the point I was making.

Whether we agree or disagree with Advocatus Diaboli’s critique of the Church’s approach to sex, he has certainly given us something to think about. And I have been thinking. I do so speculatively – so I hope you will be ready to criticise or refine my tentative ideas. I want to make a start on this occasion by trying to clarify some aspects which I think often get entangled in our minds.

The sexual drive is more complex than the simple, though strong, sexual appetite. While few people nowadays would take Freud lock, stock and barrel I would certainly accept that sexual libido is a major trigger of the human psyche. Our sexual identities are fundamental and their expression is by no means limited to overt sexual activity or conscious thought. They are an inherent part of our self images, intrinsic to much of our motivation, and are expressed to a greater or lesser extent in our relationships and our interactions.

Thus I suspect that Catholics have no greater pre-occupation with sex than anyone else. It is only because we have, or attempt to have, common sexual values and prohibitions that we talk and argue about related matters so publicly and so frequently, and often so emotionally.

Perhaps we would all agree that the expression of sexuality, while potentially wonderful, is also potentially dangerous. In whole areas we really don’t need an ecclesiastical authority to tell us that the misuse of sex is a misuse of love. Starting a new life is just as momentous an action as bringing about the end of a life. The care and thought which needs to go into that conception so that this new life has the best chance of developing and growing into a mature and good human being is a responsibility which Catholics believe is only discharged by the presence of a loving and stable marriage. And, apart from any teaching, the sociological evidence is strongly in support.

By the same token we regard sex outside marriage as unloving in two ways. The first is that it creates an emotional bond (which may in fact be unequal between the two partners) without the corresponding permanent commitment. Or, in other words, someone is likely to get hurt – perhaps even badly damaged. The fact that we have potential control over conception through natural or artificial contraception does not alter the bonding reaction which has evolved in our brains. Secondly, to risk – as is often the case – an unwanted conception is to involve a third party. In addition of course, particularly where promiscuity is involved, there is the additional danger of disease.

Sex is frequently used as an exercise of power. I am not thinking just of the blatant examples but of any occasion when it is used to gain our selfish ends. This may range from the authority figure seducing the junior to the various ways in which men and women, within and outside marriage, can use or enforce their sexuality to gain their own psychological or concrete advantages.

I simply don’t need to attach the word “sin” to any of these misuses – which may vary from the great to the trivial – because they need no label. We can judge them for ourselves.

But there is a problem here. Because of the centrality of sexuality in all of us we are extraordinarily open to temptation. The passion generated by sex is altogether different from the passion generated by, say, hunger. We vary in the strength of our sex drive – from person to person and from circumstance to circumstance. But it is possible, and indeed common, for the drive to be so strong that under the influence of passion we can behave in ways which we should utterly repudiate in other circumstances. Indeed much of the thinking of theologians in the past has been based on the tendency of sexual passion to stifle our rational powers, and turn us into satyr or gorgon. Less than human, more like brute beast.

All of this reminds us that chastity is not a passive virtue – to be called into action when needed. It is a virtue which has to be continually cultivated: not in order to avoid sexuality but to use it – including its passion – at the service of love. I find this advice easier to take at 75 than I did at 25.

I have not on this occasion looked at aspects concerned with the Natural Law and sexuality. I will keep that for another time.

A decade ago John Paul II emphasised the error of treating the Church as though it were a multinational corporation and thus subject to a purely human form of authority. While the point is well taken, the human side of the Church remains vulnerable to our fallen human nature. We see a clear precedent in the strictures which Jesus reserved for the leaders of Judaism despite their guardianship of the divine covenant.

Most people will recall that Lord Acton’s claim that power tends to corrupt was written about the Renaissance popes. Fewer will know (if only because of its very recent publication) of a study which measures and confirms this tendency, under experimental conditions. In simple terms, the more powerful (and secure) you are, the higher the standards you are likely to enforce on the people you control, and the lower the standards you apply to yourself. In other words, power is a serious “occasion of sin”.

We learnt, at our mother’s knee, that if occasions of sin cannot be avoided, they must be minimised by prudent precautions. Thus all those who hold ecclesiastical authority, from pope to priest, must work actively against the corruption of power. We have seen in microcosm what happens in a national clergy whose power is so institutionalised that even independent civil authority defers. In macrocosm we must accept that the Church has been corrupted by power at least since it became the pet religion of the Roman Empire. We should not be surprised; it is only continual, active defence against the corruption of power which can mitigate even if it cannot entirely avoid.

While abuse of power is found in other religions, the Catholic Church’s case is particularly difficult because its unity depends on a firm basis of revealed doctrine and the lynchpin of the successor to St Peter. It cannot be otherwise, nor would we wish it, but the danger of this near-absolute power is exceedingly great. It may be useful to look at some examples at random.

Outstanding, of course, has been the refusal to allow freedom of conscience in choice of religion. Error was held to have no rights. The result was enforcement of Catholic teaching, including the extremes of torture and death. It led to the Catholic colonisation of territories, and so the use of civil force for preservation. There are few behaviours which we deplore in Islam which have not been enthusiastically pursued by the Church in its time. Even in later days when this was achieved through concordats, it continued. When Vatican II finally accepted the full rights of conscience, the tardiness in dismantling the shameful concordat with Franco’s Spain demonstrated the lingering desire to maintain power at the expense of the individual. When John Paul II announced in 2001 that the Holy See “has always been vigorous in defending freedom of conscience and religious liberty”, we are lost for comment.

Vatican II rightly emphasised that the bishops, although acting in communion with the Pope, hold their diocesan powers independently as successors to the Apostles. But it has become hard to distinguish in practice the difference between being in communion and simply being a delegate. And this is made all the more obscure by the relatively novel practice of the pope choosing the diocesan bishops. A new bishop should, of course, be chosen by the local Church, with full consultation at all levels, while the Pope retains a veto which would only be used with extreme rarity. This would be a charitable way of protecting a pope from the temptation to use placemen.

I have written before about the Church’s own principle of subsidiarity - that decisions should always be taken at the lowest practicable level. In general this is continually breached (perhaps the arrogation of the translation of the English translation of the liturgy by the Vatican is the outstanding current example).

And the attitude towards being a listening community is well summed up by the Congregation for the Clergy’s statement: “All believers have the right and duty to take an active part in the mission given to the Church… but they do not have either the right or duty to give advice to the hierarchy in their exercise of their pastoral task.” Can we imagine a modern business, hoping to be successful, informing its members that they have neither the right nor the duty to give advice to management?

We do in fact know a good deal about how secular cultures form, how they are preserved and how they change. This may give us some clues. Here, however, I will simply quote from two recent popes, both presumably guided by the same Spirit.

First: “The Church has always opposed errors. Frequently she has condemned them with the greatest severity. Nowadays, however, the spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity. She considers that she meets the needs of the present day by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnations…”

Second: “To protect the Catholic faith against errors arising from the part of some of the Christian faithful it appeared highly necessary to us, whose principal task is to confirm his brethren in faith, to add (new) norms to the text of the presently valid Code of Canon Law, in order to impose expressly the duty to preserve the truths proposed definitively by the Magisterium of the Church, and, concerning the same matter, to institute canonical sanctions (against the violators).”

You may see, as one senior theologian did, a marked contrast between the two approaches to the use of authority. Which one relates, do you think, most closely to the Gospel? How can the Church at all levels maintain its God given authority while minimising the abuse of power? The answers to those questions may define the course of what the Church will give the world over the long distant future.

Our old, if critical, friend, Advocatus Diaboli, has had some spare time between Christmas and the New Year. And if the Devil makes work for idle hands, we can expect his advocate take advantage of the opportunity. I have now received a further contribution from him – and I look forward to you putting him firmly, though I am sure courteously, in his place. Quentin.

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Thank you once again for the hospitality of Secondsightblog. I am not going to comment on the discussion which followed my last contribution, you must decide for yourselves. Instead I turn to a different subject.

An outsider, like me, might well get the impression that the Catholic Church is primarily a movement designed to control, and preclude as far as possible, anything to do with sexual activity. That impression might be formed from the fact that it is the one subject which, in different manifestations, gets the greatest column inches. And, even on a blog to which mature people like yourselves contribute, anything related to sexuality seems to get the most comments. If I may take a single example, your Bishop O’Donoghue (whose work on Catholic doctrine has recently been commended by the Vatican) was able to claim that obedience to the Church’s condemnation of all contraception was the “litmus test” of Catholicism.

This remark may seem idiotic, but – taken against history – it is typical of how Christianity can be perverted with the best of intentions. I can see very little in the Gospels about sexual sin (and what is there is compassionate), and in St Paul what is condemned is not sexuality but sexual excess. Even his cautions on marriage can be explained by his belief (based foolishly on taking Jesus’ words literally) that the end of the world was about to come. If that is what a bishop in good standing thinks being a Catholic is primarily about, he is either a fool or my case is already proved.

Where did it all start? The major authority was Augustine who was a reformed Manichean. Like many converts his reaction was extreme, and the result was his doctrine that the only justification for sexual intercourse was procreation (Manicheans believed that procreation was sinful, and advocated alternative sexual practices). Augustine believed that sexual pleasure as such was sinful, even in marital intercourse; that the terrible inheritance of original sin was transmitted through this lust. Not a very good start for an attitude which was to last about 1500 years.

About 200 years later we find Pope St Gregory the Great making it clear that the libido  necessary for sexual intercourse was in itself sinful, and should preclude a man from entering a church for a time. Aquinas takes the same general view. And so on – until the great alarm caused by Pius X1th in 1930 suggesting that, under certain conditions, intercourse without intention to procreate could be lawful and good.

Being as generous as possible I calculate that for 77% of the history of Christianity it has been generally and explicitly taught that every form of genital expression, even in the most loving expression of the holiest of marriages, is inevitably sinful. Not bad for an infallible Church, is it?

And what about those who are picked as leaders of the Church? We might think of the bright-eyed seminarians, fully infused with call of the Spirit. The only figures I have are from the 1950s but a study at that time showed that their rate of self abuse was 99%. Interestingly it was somewhat higher than most other groups. Coming to much more modern history (2002) I find that less than half the priests under age 45 believe that to be a practising homosexual is inconsistent with being a priest. How many would you guess accept self abuse? And you do not need me to turn the knife in the wound of international paedophilia.

I am not commenting on the rights and wrong of any of these practices. I am merely saying that they are grossly at variance with what your Church teaches. Fundamentally I am accusing you of deep laid hypocrisy. The only indulgence I can offer is that long, indurated culture (and 1500 years is long) has put you into denial. You may be forgiven because you do not know what you do.

Do you believe that the celibacy of the clergy is a great and sacred thing – allowing a priest to devote himself to his mission? Nonsense and double nonsense. There are plenty of monastic orders for those who choose celibacy as a free act. The secular clergy (and take that right up to the bishops and cardinals, and all the other steps on the ladder of priestly ambition) rejoice in a celibacy which allows them to conceal their lack of experience and their fear of an intimate committed relationship with the opposite sex. Don’t bother to tell me that there are exceptions, I am concerned with the many who sustain a regime of sexual orthodoxy not through a mature understanding but through warped and wounded personalities. These are the people who have the sheer impertinence to pontificate on how you should lead your sexual lives.

When your Church has rid itself of such attitudes I will listen to what she has to say about sexuality. She may or may not have a good deal to contribute. In the meanwhile I’d as soon walk down Soho and buy a dirty film. At least no one there is pretending.

Your friend, Advocatus Diaboli

What is the most misused word in the debates which surround the Church’s actions and relationships? My prime candidate is the word “authority”. With menacing inevitability it is always reduced to command and obedience. In doing so we condemn ourselves to live in a mindframe which the better elements in the secular world began to abandon by the mid 20th century, and which carries all the penal overtones of medieval autocracy. But true authority is not like that at all.

We get a glimmer of true authority by recalling that God who sustains us in existence from moment to moment by his constant omnipotence did not bear down on us: he gave us free will. When we thoroughly messed that up he did not abandon us but gave himself in total sacrifice to redeem us from our arrogant misuse of his gift, and then provided us with every means to flourish as sons rather than servants.

If that is a flavour of authority at the divine scale how would it translate on the human scale of, say, an ordinary secular, commercial organisation?

This is certainly not a democracy. The owners may, within the constraints of the law, exercise full authority - from setting the objectives, the standards, the routines, the rewards and the sanctions. But that authority may be exercised in radically different ways.

Well into the 20th century it was accepted wisdom that workers were primarily responsive to rewards and punishments. They were not of the calibre to take responsibility or to think for themselves, and thus tasks had to be set out in detail, and timed to ensure the appropriate level of outcome. In a sense the worker was a machine who happened to be human. It was called “scientific management”.

From the middle of the century onwards it began to be understood that, generally speaking, an enterprise was far more successful if the workers were treated as intelligent human beings who reacted well to responsibility. Authority became primarily a leadership activity, inspiring and co-ordinating the willing and co-operative workers - who brought their minds as well as their bodies to the task.

This change was not a result of increased virtue on the part of management but partly because more and more jobs actually required active thought, and primarily because enterprises run in this way tended to be much more successful. If you do not immediately recognise names like Maslow, Herzberg, Likert and McGregor, it is because the battle between worker as machine, and worker as human being, was won far enough in the past for it to be taken largely for granted.

Certain characteristics of these new organisations are worth noting. The first is that the leadership was clear about the ethos and objectives of the business. It had its key success factors and values: for the most part they could be summarised on a sheet of paper. But they would be communicated and applied in a variety of different ways - by example, through the questions asked or in general formal or informal discussion. Rarely, if ever, were they issued as orders, there was no need. There was greater emphasis on encouraging successful behaviour than on fault-finding.

Second, communication - upwards, downwards and sideways - was encouraged. This enhanced the sense of participation, and the organisation benefited continually from the experience of staff at different levels.

Third, the organisation tended to be very open. Naturally there will always be some confidential information but the leadership instinct was to keep everybody as well informed as possible. (Keeping quiet only when you had to, as opposed to telling people only when you had to.)

Of course, for brevity, I have painted a bad guy/good guy picture. The reality was more complex. The application of worker responsibility would differ between an accountancy office and an advertising agency, for instance. And considerable ingenuity would be required when much of the work was mechanical by necessity. Many firms claimed to promote worker responsibility while disingenuously reducing it in other ways. Other firms had bad initial experiences - a residue of past habits - and abandoned change. There were organisations who took the new thinking as an excuse for eschewing active leadership; we see this particularly in organisations where the discipline of the market does not apply. And, naturally, there were, and remain, managements who feel that the workforce cannot be trusted, and so the business remains in a constant state of tension and high personnel turnover.

The question of authority in the Church is sensitive at the present time, in view of the reports on abuse in Ireland. There can be no doubt that the misuse of authority played a large part in the sorry history. Not only was it employed to protect the strong against the weak, but it was employed in the interests of secrecy rather than openness. Even the Holy See has been accused of a culpable blind eye.

We should start off of course by considering whether this was simply an aberration of time, circumstance and place. But then we must consider to what extent it might relate to the way that the Church exercises authority. Do we see the organisation communicating its core values in an effective and inspirational way - with an emphasis on what we get right rather than what we get wrong? Are the members of the community seen as responsible, trustworthy, and focused on the same objectives? Is the Church an example to the world of openness and good communication? Do outsiders still say of us, as Tertullian claimed, “Look how they love one another.”

I do not doubt that I will one day feel motivated to answer that question with more concrete detail. But I shall be grateful if you tell us what you think.

My wife has from time to time accused me of not listening, with the simple question: “What did I just say?” Whereupon I have immediately repeated, word for word, her last relevant sentences. She finds this irritating. But of course I have not been listening because my mind has been engaged elsewhere - thinking about my next column, perhaps. What I have used is my acoustic memory, which retains for a few seconds material to which I have not consciously adverted.
I have heard, but I have not listened. And in this column I want to write a little about the difference. This is not a trivial subject. I would argue that our quality of listening is an essential virtue. Without it, our ability to love our neighbour as ourselves is no more than a self-serving delusion.
Imagine, as an example, that you have a friend who is explaining to you why she is sending her child to a non-Catholic school, when a good Catholic school is reasonably available. Further, imagine that you are instinctively and quite definitely opposed to the idea. You may find that your brain is multitasking. One part is taking in what she says, the other is judging what she says and taking every reasonable opportunity to put forward counter arguments.
Most conversations, even about minor matters, occur like this. It is a verbal tennis match in which you watch your opponent’s shots with great care, and position yourself to make the next return.
How does this contrast with proper listening? Here, your full attention is focused on what your friend is saying, and the feelings which accompany her words. You are trying to understand why she is making this choice, but seeing it from her perspective. While she is speaking you are making no reply other than occasionally to confirm that you have understood what she is saying and why. You are listening with full attention to her and not to yourself.
What has happened to you as a result of listening? You may not have changed your mind about the issue one jot, but you now have some insight, some understanding of why she takes this view. If you would wish her to change her mind, at least you know what her mind is, and the degree of care she has taken in arriving at that decision.
What has happened to her? The very process of being able to tell her story has helped her to look at it. She may even begin to wonder, at least in the back of her mind, whether her decision is altogether correct, once she has heard herself put it into words. And when you have occasionally confirmed your understanding she has been given a chance to correct or refine what she has said.
What has happened to both of you? There is an increase in mutual trust. For her, because she has been listened to, accepted and not judged. For you, because of your greater understanding. And, above all, your listening has earned you the right to a mutual exploration of her ideas.
This exploration is not a series of counter arguments but helping her to look more closely at her views, and to take into account issues, both emotional and factual, which she may not have considered fully. It is axiomatic, and supported by good studies, that people rarely change their minds through confrontational argument. They can only be midwived towards discovering new views for themselves. The outcome is not your responsibility. It is enough if her eventual decision, whatever it is, is freer and better informed than it would have been without your help.
The principles I have described cover a range - from someone considering abortion to a child complaining about being bored at school. It applies to boss and employee, husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend, doctor and patient, trade union and management. It applies to us listening to the teaching Church, and the teaching Church listening to us. A goodly proportion of conflicts at the personal, social and international level would be solved if only people would learn and practise good listening.
But don’t fool yourself. Good listening is hard to do; it runs against our natural grain, which draws us towards defending our principles and interests. Instinctively we are pulled towards expressing our own opinions and prevailing over the opinions of others. Listening is very much a discipline at which our skills improve with practice. And it is all to easy to slip back into our old bad habits unless we conscientiously watch ourselves. I have certainly found it so.
In my days as a marriage counsellor I found that simply teaching a husband and wife to listen to each other was my major constructive activity. But it does not just operate at such a dramatic level; it is needed whenever someone wants to tell us something which is important to them. And that gives us an opportunity to put in some practice.
The next time someone wants you to listen - unless you are a hermit it will happen today or tomorrow - try good listening as I have described it. You may be surprised at the outcome. So will the speaker, for it is likely that this will be their first experience of someone really listening to them.
Do you want, and sometimes badly need, to be listened to? If you do, you will understand why good listening is, as I write above, essential to loving your neighbour as yourself. It may not be identified as a specific virtue in any formal listing. But it’s there.

This is the leading article from The Catholic Herald, issue 4 November 2009

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The Ryan report on Irish child abuse, published in May, left us holding our collective breath, waiting for the publication of the Murphy inquiry into child abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin. And it has proved again to be not so much another nail in the coffin as another nail in the Cross. The Body of Christ has been wounded, not by his enemies but by those who claimed to be his friends.

Our immediate task is to be on our knees: first, to pray for the victims; second, to pray for the priests who betrayed their vocations; third, to pray for those whose dereliction of duty put the reputation of the Church ahead of the command of love. And throughout we must remember that we “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.

It is in that spirit alone that we may start to ask the questions. We must never minimise the damage which sexual abuse so often does to the young. Those who have suffered know this; those who work with them in later life know this too. Yet it is common in many circumstances – including that of the close family. It is not typified as a clerical crime, nor indeed exclusive to any one sexual tendency. Like so many sexual sins, the temptations can be blindingly powerful, and what may seem to the perpetrator to be an almost trivial incident can have consequences which echo through a lifetime. Our only safeguard is to work continuously at the virtue of chastity, whether we are married or unmarried.

Though we may shrink with disgust from the sin, we recoil with a different emotion from the calculated cover-up, described by the report as “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the Church and the preservation of its assets”. This was not spontaneous temptation but cold, institutionalised policy, carried out at senior levels – and implicitly encouraged by the neglect of the Holy See. The reputation of the Church was preserved at the direct cost of Christ’s little ones. Here at least holy anger is justified. “My house is a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.”

And with holy anger may come hope. Is there a chance that the Church will be shocked into abandoning its cultural history of treating authority as a hierarchy of power and not as a hierarchy of loving service? Will we learn that we are a community bonded in our readiness to accept and love each other: “members of one another” – not just in words but in truth?

And since we are members of one another, should we not ask our bishops to declare a day of solemn reparation for the institutional and personal corruption with which we have wounded the Body of Christ?

O     O     O

A leader is the voice of a newspaper rather than of any particular person. But I happen to know that those who prepared this leader found all your comments, and the emails sent to me directly, very inspiring.

I want to thank everyone of you who helped. And discussion will I hope continue – including, if you wish, comment on the leader itself.

We have all been holding our collective breath for the report of the Commission to inquire into child abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese. It has now been published and has proved to be not so much another nail in the coffin as another nail in the Cross.

No doubt The Catholic Herald will be reporting in its next edition, but I thought that members of Secondsightblog would appreciate the opportunity to express a view more immediately. I will make sure that your views are brought to the Editor’s attention – but in order for him to have your reactions in mind initial comments must be posted by Monday.

Anyone who wishes to email me personally may do so (but say if you want me to maintain your anonymity). It would be helpful to know if your are a member of the clergy, or your denomination - if you are not a Catholic.

There are plenty of news sources around. I would recommend starting with the BBC, which has useful additional links. The Times has good coverage, as do several other newspapers. The full report is available.

I do not want to influence your reactions in any way, but it may help to consider any or all of these aspects:  the abusing priest himself, the official cover up, and what our verdict is on a church structure and culture in which such things can happen.

Remember: by Monday for maximum impact.

SUNDAY MORNING. YOUR REACTIONS HAVE BEEN SPLENDID.  ANYONE HESITATING – EVEN TO GIVE A ONE LINE MESSAGE — NOW IS THE TIME TO HAVE YOUR SAY.

It is clear that the December Copenhagen conference on climate change will not result in a legally binding treaty committing countries to emission targets. The best we may hope for is political agreement, involving immediate action – to be followed, optimistically, by a treaty next year. Even then much depends on the US Congress passing its climate change bill; and several other countries have particular interests they want to protect.

No day seems to pass without at least one new study suggesting that the onset of global warming will be much worse or much better, and will come much sooner or much later. Once again I am thrown back, for reasons of prudence, on the broad, but not universal, consensus of the scientific community. The outcomes it predicts are not precise and cover a range of possibilities. Future assessments will vary the predictions and the time scales, but we must assume that the general thrust will remain much the same. The current general target is to limit warming to the “danger” threshold of 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Substantially greater cuts in emissions than have been agreed so far will be required to achieve this.

But the orthodox view smacks to me more of setting targets which countries may be induced to accept rather than the realistic probabilities which face us. Without doubt the world is becoming warmer, but frankly we don’t really know how much warmer. We can hope to alleviate its effects, primarily through reducing industrial emissions, and we can hope to adapt. But the best we can say about these strategies is that outcomes would be worse without them. As Gordon Brown has said, there is no Plan B which will save the world from a “catastrophe” of floods, droughts and killer heatwaves.

Different regions of the world will be affected in different ways, and on different time scales. But the general picture which the IPCC paints is not attractive. Both storms and droughts will become more frequent and more severe. In addition to death and disease arising from these, malaria and other infections will spread to more regions. Heart and respiratory problems will increase with the increase in ground level ozone. Coastal flooding and erosion will overcome large areas in Asia and Africa; small, inhabited islands will be totally submerged.

The impoverished nations, particularly around the equator, will be affected most immediately because they are highly dependent on climate, and lack the resources for adaptation. More temperate climes will have a longer time scale, and the resources to adapt, but, well within the predicted possibilities of temperature change, these too will become vulnerable. Unfortunately more recent studies are suggesting that these effects will be more severe and closer at hand than the IPCC was in a position to forecast. Global warming appears to be accelerating.

So we look, without great optimism, to mitigation and adaptation. The list of possibilities is long but their implementation is another question. The schemes for reducing emissions by replacing fossil fuels are essential but expensive. Ironically it is the developed regions, less affected by climate change, that have the resources to help the developing world. But the developing world can only provide its own resources by industrialisation which will depend on the cheap power which tends to produce high emissions.

There is much expensive work to be done on infrastructure, and there is the likelihood of large-scale migrations towards temperate areas. The danger from this cannot be underestimated: the need for new territory is a common cause of armed conflict. Universal martial law may sound extreme; but it may not seem so one day.

Those who are opposed to genetically engineered crops must leave the room. However good their motivations may have been, these count for nothing now. It has even been suggested that we should become vegetarian because of the methane produced by herd animals. We have now been told that a dog has a larger carbon footprint than a four-wheel gas-guzzler, so the lighthearted suggestion that we should start by eating our dogs is not so lighthearted after all. I hope we won’t have to go as far as Jonathan Swift’s ironic suggestion about the over-fertile and undernourished  Irish poor – that they should eat their babies.

Eating babies reminds us that the carbon footprint of humans has led to arguments for the reduction of population through widespread contraception. But contraception, whether through artificial or natural methods, only tends to make a difference in settled and prosperous countries. Then it needs no advocates, for people take to it like ducks to water. In any event, it is grabbing a tiger by the tail. Developed nations have shown that widespread contraception is a one-way street: population fertility cannot be turned on and off like a tap.

So I must return to my starting point of several columns ago. Climate change is not the only issue. We still have the daily struggle of conforming our petty lives to the love of God. We still live in a society which is riven through with corruption and selfishness. Yet none of us can neglect climate change as an overarching, cataclysmic threat to our children and grandchildren; nor can we – who have benefited from industrialisation –  ignore the countries which cannot help themselves. What was once the scenario of science fiction is now all too likely to become science fact. It will demand great sacrifice, and great political will. And that political will is simply a euphemism for what you and I, as voters, choose to do. The rest is in God’s hands. As for me, I shall either be in heaven or undergoing a severe global warming of my own