Veering Off-Planet

The Pontiff of Paedophilia's chief henchman in England and Wales is doing his best to triangulate between the Scylla of Vatican intransigence and the Charybdis of British hypocrisy, and seems unsurprisingly to have got into a bit of a tangle. Archbishop Vincent Nichols is Pharisee enough to wish to avoid being seen in the company of moral and intellectual publicans of the stripe of Baroness Warsi and Lord Carey of Blathering-in-the-Dotage; but his attempt to distance himself from the lunatic fringe while retaining his own commitment to gay-bashing and Catholic supremacy leaves the reverend gentleman looking rather like a Labour health minister trying to work out an alternative to NHS privatisation that walks, talks and steals like privatisation but doesn't look like it.

Nichols refers to the prohibition of discrimination against gay parents as "an act of intolerance" on the grounds that Catholic adoption agencies should be allowed to commit acts of intolerance, because they take orders from the Vatican rather than from the law of the land. As a matter of fact, most Catholic adoption agencies have managed to resign themselves to operating within the law, although the Church is considering an appeal, since it has nothing better on which to spend the small part of its wealth which is left over from all that poverty, chastity and humility.

Asked about the Vatican's description of homosexuality as a "tendency towards an objective moral evil", Nichols said it was a "philosophical construct" not aimed at any individual. Catholic teaching about sex is "based on the idea that it leads to babies, and this must be its highest good". On an overcrowded planet, this is certainly a sensible start. "The trouble is that when Catholic priests explain the purposes of sexuality they sound too often like a Martian at a football match." Well, hardly. The trouble is that a Catholic priest lecturing on sex is either speaking whereof he has little or no experience, or else speaking whereof he has illicit experience and counselling others to do as he says and not as he does. He is either a hoarder giving investment advice or a hypocrite mouthing empty words.

"One talks about objective moral evil, you might say today, that's racism. No matter what's intended or understood, that, objectively, is wrong", in the subjective opinion of today's anti-racists. "In a similar way, you can say, in every sphere of life there is objective moral evil". You can say it, certainly; whether you would make much sense in doing so is a different matter. "But that does not imply subjective moral guilt. That does not imply guilt on an individual." Presumably, then, an individual who performs an act which is an objective moral evil is not, as an individual, guilty of that act even though he really ought to stop doing it at once. I wonder if Archbishop Nichols' reasoning might not be a little disordered, objectively speaking.