England: the redeeming features

It was a wonderful day on Saturday, and we took advantage of it to go walking with a friend in one of most charming places we know: Ashridge Forest, about a forty-minute drive from where we live.

Ashridge Forest: lovely in autumn, lovely in any season

Our return to England, after five weeks of warmth and sunshine as well as clear roads, was made painful by the lousy weather and appalling traffic. Fortunately, England does have many glorious aspects to compensate. Saturday’s weather was one. As for Ashridge, where one can walk for miles though woods and fields, with occasional glimpses of deer, it’s right up there with the best of them.

These are the aspects of England, along with the friends we shall be leaving behind, that I shall miss when we complete our Brexit exit before the axe falls at the end of next March.

After Ashridge, our friend suggested we might like to head for the nearby market town of Tring, where there was an apple festival that day. That sounded like a good plan. I could already picture myself eating a sausage washed down with a pint of cider – I was planning to ask for pear cider, just to be perverse – at what I assumed would be cheerful, bustling fair.

Sadly, it was not to be. There’d be an apple parade in the morning, but by the time we showed up in town the festival was all over. Indeed, pretty much all that was left was to watch another friend and her Morris dancing group perform outside the Church.

Morris Dancing: more appealing than I'd expected

I’ve never been a great fan of Morris dancing, the rather strange custom mocked by many foreigners – indeed, by many English people – in which the dancers wear elaborate costumes decorated with bells, so they tinkle through the complex steps of the dances, accompanied by folk music played on traditional instruments, such as fiddles, guitars, squeezeboxes and tambourines. All a little weird. And yet, I have to admit, the group we saw was pretty impressive, the dancing spellbinding and highly skilful.

I think I could develop a taste for it, a discovery I’ve perhaps made a little late given that we’re about to leave the country where it has its roots.

The Morris dancing was outside the church, and it was inside it that I discovered the only trace of the apple festival: large sheets of paper on which people – children, I assume, for the most part – had glued cutouts of apples which they’d then coloured. I suppose it was gratifying to find some reminder of the festival, though it hardly made up for the brimming pint I’d promised myself and, in the absence of the sausage stand I’d been sure to find, it left me feeling hungry.

The closest we got to any apples. Let alone cider

The church smelled of incense, which suggested to me that it was probably High-Church: the Church of England isn’t content with being merely Protestant, it has currents running from the most Protestant Low-Church at one end of the spectrum, through Middle Church to the quasi-Catholic High Church at the other end. Fortunately, they don’t burn each other’s adherents anymore, so all these distinctions are now just part of the quaintness of English life.

Along with activities like Morris Dancing, festivals that are over so fast that you can miss them if you blink or pretty little market towns like Tring, which means places for the prosperous Middle Class to live and cultivate its charm.

The Church of St Peter and St Paul, Tring

I shall miss them all. Though perhaps not the church, fine though it was. If there’s one thing we’ve already found Spain isn’t short of, it’s Churches. Catholic, of course, almost without exception, but then the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Tring, with its scent of incense, isn’t really that different.

As for apples, well Danielle has plenty from her allotment. She'd turned a whole bunch of them into apple stew which we had with yoghurt when we got home. Pretty well made up for the lack of cider...

The St Peter Plot: has the Vatican been infiltrated?

There is a classic response to a question to which the answer is obviously ‘yes’, which is to question the Catholicism of the Pope.

For instance, you might get the following exchange:

‘Do the Tea Party people proclaim Christian values but still want to deprive the poor of healthcare?’

‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’

It's a bit like the expression about teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, which occupied me in my previous blog.

However, recent events make it far less obvious that the Pope really is a Catholic. I mean, he clearly is, in the formal sense that he heads the Catholic Church, but is he a Catholic at heart?

It is a central tenet of Catholicism that the Grace of God is obtainable by any sinner – and every one of us is a sinner, ever since the Fall in the Garden of Eden – eating apples wasn’t always the healthiest of activities – but we have to seek forgiveness through the process of confession, which starts with sincere contrition followed by full confession (contritio cordis, the contrition of the heart, followed by confessio oris, the confession of the mouth).

This distinguishes Catholicism from Protestantism. Calvinists, in particular, believe that Grace is entirely arbitrary, in the literal sense of the word ‘arbitrary’ – it is an act of will, in this case God’s will, and cannot be influenced by any action of ours. They build a strong case for this view based on the omniscience of God. Follow this carefully, it’s quite complicated.

Because God knows all, he knows not only everything that happens but everything that ever will happen. He therefore knows what we are going to do throughout our lives, and he knows long before we do anything, whether we are saved or ultimately lost, whether we are destined for heaven or the other place. Now if something is known before it happens, then it's predetermined. God's knowledge of everything from the start of time, means everything is predetermined.

Consequently nothing we do, or fail to do, can possibly affect whether we make it to heaven or not. We may not know whether we're predetermined for salvation or damnation, but we certainly can't do anything about it – either way.

This view received its fullest expression in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner in which the protagonist learns that he is one of the Elect, and can therefore do whatever he likes including commit murders and other heinous offences, because he’s bound to be saved anyway.

Many Calvinists argue that this is a travesty of their view, but hey, they would, wouldn’t they?

Anyway, the point is that the Pope refuses point blank to issue any kind of apology for the abuse scandals now rocking the Church. Instead, he attacks the media for their frenzy in trying to undermine his credibility.

You can see his point. The Pope’s neighbour, Italy’s revered Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, feels the same about the media. He denounces them for their vicious and unfounded attacks against him. Some parts of the media have alleged, for example, that the fact that British lawyer David Mills has been found guilty of accepting a bribe from Berlusconi suggests that Berlusconi must be guilty of having paid it. Extraordinary, isn’t it, the way people sometimes leap to conclusions on the scantiest of evidence?

So the Pope may have every reason for complaining of persecution by the media. Nevertheless, it’s hard to see in his behaviour either contritio cordis or confessio oris. The latter, you might think, could take the form of an apology, of the kind so many other Church leaders have been issuing lately.

Instead the papal position seems to be that the Church is above question, that because it is the Church, it speaks for God and deserves respect, whatever it or its servants may have done.

Now doesn’t that sound like the Confessions of a Justified Sinner?

Could it be that the Catholic Church has been infiltrated at the highest level by Protestants?

But let’s pursue this further. The Protestant Anglican Communion is torn at the moment between liberals who favour the ordination of gay priests and traditionalists who oppose this as unspeakable blasphemy.

A lot of the recent scandals concern Catholic priests abusing boys. So in not denouncing them, isn’t Benedict in effect condoning a gay priesthood?

Now the liberal Anglicans aren't keen on the abuse but they'd certainly go along with the tolerance of a gay priesthood. Doesn't this suggest that the views of liberal Anglicanism may have taken over the very top of the Catholic Church?

Now that would be a turn-up for the books, wouldn’t it? Imagine what Henry VIII, who founded the Anglican Communion in his celebrated split from Rome, might have thought. And doesn’t this just put into the shade all the trivial little conspiracies that Dan Brown makes his millions exposing?

So the question for Easter 2010 has to be: is Benedict XVI a closet liberal Anglican?

Just remember: you read it here first.