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Much has been made of Pope Leo’s time in Peru and his closeness to the late Pope Francis from Argentina. Being first American Pope has been no less newsworthy. But his impact on the USA is proving more important than his outreach to Latin America. He has deplored the cruelty of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and expects the US bishops unitedly to follow his lead championing the human dignity of migrants. On 12 November the US Catholic Bishops Conference issued an urgent Special Message on Immigration reflecting the Pope’s concerns.
It looks as if he is not, like his – significantly chosen - namesake Leo XIII, going to wait years before producing a 21st century equivalent about the dangers of the “New Things”, (Rerum Novarum, 1893) brought about by the industrial revolution. Most strikingly despite its benefits, he promises to tease out the present dangers of AI lurking in San Francisco’s Silicon Valley. “A clear and present danger” is an American legal term used to define when free speech may be limited because of a threat to public safety and national security. It might apply to Trump since he won last November; he is now entering the second year of his second Presidency. As do St. Paul’s words to his missionary companion Timothy: “The love of money is the root of all evil”. Growing economic and social changes caused by the digital revolution and AI, routinely described as the ‘new industrial revolution’, are a present, though less clear, danger. An important outcome of the original industrial revolution was that a dominant land-owning class had to come to terms with the power of the new industrialists and entrepreneurs. A progressive extension of the franchise was the result. An oligarchy with its pretensions of class and nobility saw its power reduced. Not so in today’s tech revolution which has given a new oligarchy spectacularly greater wealth and unaccountable political power. The ‘information economy’ has relied on technological innovation. But cyberspace is unlike the space in which the 12-year old Dickens worked in a blacking factory, Fordist assembly lines, billboards and football stadiums - other than that they were, and are, where money is made, quite literally in the case of Bitcoin. The unaccountable lords of silicon valley, the main hub of AI, are along with Trump, the main protagonists in the compelling story of democracies entering a new epoch. How the political and the socio-economic are put together, combining to create a new political economy, is the $64 trillion question. The Greek economist and former politician Yanis Yaroufaxis in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, (Penguin 2024), makes an entertaining crack at explaining how the tech giants make a fortune out of our addiction to small bright screens with their pictures and information, hoovering up masses of data in order to influence our behaviour. It is a prodigious and worrying development. Hybrid cars run on petrol and electricity. In the US political life runs on money and social media. The tech oligarchy offer both of them in exchange for proximity to, and influence over Government. This relationship is analysed in BBC 1’s November 3rd Panorama programme, “Trump & The Tech Titans”, revealing the malign consequences of the US Supreme Court’s 5/4 ruling in the crucial 2014 case, McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission. The five Supreme Court judges declared unconstitutional 1971 legislation which had capped political donations over two years towards federal electoral campaigning. The issue was deemed to be one of freedom of speech, bearing no negative impacts on government and offering no opening for corruption. A case which opened the way for floods of corporate and private money to enter and shape American politics. Panorama documented how the extraordinary wealth of the tech titans had been the lubricant for their entering the circles of power. Their wealth is unprecedented: Elon Musk is worth c. $497 billion, Larry Ellison who owns Tik Tok, CBS and CNN, c. $320 billion, and Peter Thiel, around 100th in the global wealth table, at c. $23 billion, is a founder of PaypaL and Palantir. All are donors to Republican party and close to the Trump administration. The US tech giants are far from a homogeneous group. Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang and, particularly, Bill Gates do good things with their money. But Musk in early 2025, looking increasingly deranged by money and power, offered an extreme version of Obama’s ‘yes-we-can’, yes we-can-do-anything-we-want. Ellison was and is a great promotor of AI and a key payer in the Stargate Project, a new company intending to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI. Thiel founded Palantir Technologies with its current CEO, Alex Karp ($2.3 billion). It handles $billions in Pentagon contracts for military software. Trump & The Tech Titans is particularly thought-provoking in its examination of Thiel’s relationship with JD Vance, the hillbilly kid from the Appalachians who since 2011 fulfilled the American dream partly thanks to mentoring and financial support from Thiel. He also became a Catholic in 2019. Vance, at first anti-Trump then post-2016 pro-Trump, was endorsed by Trump for an Ohio Senate seat in 2022 with the help of $15 million from Thiel. Much of Vance’s campaign money went through the Protect Ohio Values super- PAC (Political Action Committee), and Trump’s Save America PAC, PACs having become the standard way of funding political advertising since the Supreme Court Ruling in 2014. Thiel’s background is evangelical. This September, remarkably, he gave a number of lectures on the Anti-Christ who heralds the end of times, (not, however, by using facial recognition software). The Anti-Christ will apparently present as an evil tyrant who seeks to get control of science - and presumably AI. Trump seems not too bothered by what the oligarchs think and believe while he invests in their more lucrative enterprises like the cryptocurrency business. He reportedly seems equally unconcerned by the distinction between what is in the national interest and his own financial interest. What the Panorama programme tellingly intimated is that we should be worrying more about Vance than about Trump. Since before 2016 when he was denigrating Trump, Vance has made a 180 degree turn, and now holds to the whole of Trump’s extreme right wing agenda. He could even do another 180 degree turn. The tech titans – and the Republican Party - may well feel their money, influence and future are better invested in Vance than in an aging Trump. For Trump to run in 2028, he would need to tear up the clear constitutional limitation enshrined in the 22nd. Amendment that no President can serve more than two terms. No-one knows how important abortion remains for American voters since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022. But the danger of Vance, the Catholic kid from the Appalachians, is that he could pull in a large US Catholic vote behind him. Vance with the power of his backers – yes power not ‘agency’ - could leave AI relatively uncontrolled and normalise fascist-leaning populism. He is a clear and future danger to democracy. The Church in America is entering an interesting time.
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In a world riven by conflicts in which religious identity plays a significant part interfaith dialogue is not an abstract idea. Pope Leo in a speech to representatives of world religions and members of the diplomatic corps, Walking Together in Hope, celebrated the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate signed near the end of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Subtitled ‘Declaration on Relations with Non-Christian Religions’, it came from Pope John XXIII asking Cardinal Bea to present a treatise to the forthcoming Council transforming centuries of Christian antisemitism into friendly dialogue with Judaism. Following Pope Paul VI’s creation of a Secretariat for Non-Christians in May 1964, the interventions of bishops from Muslim countries at the Council contributed to making Nostra Aetate a mandate for wider, more inclusive, inter-religious dialogue.
Though the bishops in the Middle East remained influential, Africa was arguably the most important testing ground for the Church’s commitment to interfaith dialogue, and on a visit to Uganda in 1969 Paul VI made his first address to a Muslim audience. In West Africa Christianity had moved inland from the coast after the mid-19th century to meet Islam from North Africa along a wide belt south of the Sahara. At the end of August 1965, Paul VI appointed Father Francis Arinze Archbishop of Onitsha, in predominantly Catholic Biafra, just before war broke out with the Federal Republic supported by the Muslim-majority North. From 1984-2002, Arinze led the Secretariat for Non-Christians, then, became President, as it was renamed in 1988, of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue (PCID). The Society of Missionaries of Africa MAfr, known as the White Fathers, had to compete with Islam. In 1972, they fielded an Arabic scholar, born in Walsall, Father Michael Fitzgerald, now Cardinal, as a consultor for the Secretariat for Non-Christians, bringing expert advice from his time in Tunisia, Uganda and Sudan. From 1987-2002 he worked as its Secretary then as successor to Arinze as President of PCID. Pope Benedict XVI made him Nuncio to Egypt in March 2006, downgrading the PCID and combining it with the Vatican body for culture. It was ill-judged. He separated them again and, in 2017, the redoubtable Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran took over interfaith relations. That November, King Abdullah Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia visited Benedict. Faced by an internal threat from Al-Qaeda, the King was, on the face of it, promoting tolerance of diversity and dialogue with other faiths. His endeavours came to fruition in 2012 with the launching of the King Abdullah Interfaith Centre (KAICIID) in Vienna, a joint venture with the Austrian and Spanish governments. Alongside UN Secretary-General Ban-ki-Moon and religious leaders from around the world, the three Foreign Ministers of Austria, Spain and Saudi Arabia attended, forming the Council of Parties, its governing body. Cardinal Tauran, mentally as sharp as a razor, physically already bearing Parkinson’s disease with fortitude, spoke briefly. The Vatican would remain a ‘founding observer’ with the Council of Parties until Saudi Arabia permitted churches to be built. The Church’s caution is well-founded. Unsaid is dialogue can also be manipulated for political ends, even when all those involved are acting in good faith. Authoritarian regimes are often concerned about their public image. Set-piece sessions, government-sponsored Institutes of Interreligious Dialogue, not inadvertently, can give the appearance of tolerance and openness in a political system based on repression. This was a lesson I learned from participating in several delegations to Tehran, 2000-2006, for dialogue with Shi’a scholars, under Anglican Church to Foreign Office auspices. Our interlocutors discussed post-modernism, youth’s indifference to religion, western feminism, the ‘last times’, eschatology, the Virgin Mary, conspiracy theories about 9/11. One told us - through a struggling translator- about his conversation with ‘a pop-singer’ in Rome - correctly translated ‘Ratzinger’. We were taken to the extraordinary underground Shi’a archives in Qom, and to meet Grand Ayatollah Hossein Mazaheri in Isfahan who gave his condolences for a recent terrorist bombing in London. A visit in February 2006 was ill-timed, coinciding with the delayed reaction to the September 2005 publication of 12 cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Muslims were deeply offended by its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad. Our delegation was informed in an announcement by a Hujjat-al-Islam, an honorific title one below Ayatollah, that the Danish Government were ordering the cartoons be sent to all schools in Denmark. It was a glimpse of how conspiracy obsessions and political manipulation worked in Iran. Most of those we met, including – later - President Khatami who initiated the dialogues, had honorable intentions. But under the then new President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hidden hand was all too visible. Such is interfaith dialogue at high institutional level, necessarily formal, a distinctive aspect of diplomacy. Erudite papers are given. Church officials scrutinise final joint statements, a comma out here, a semi-colon in there. Mutual understanding and new relationships may grow during meals and after sessions. Without dialogue taking place at a more grass roots level much of the high-level effort by the Churches would be limited in impact. Institutional dialogue doesn’t appear as Pope Leo’s focus in his address on Nostra Aetate: rather, dialogue inspired by encounters in everyday life creating a particular texture of society and the common good. Interfaith dialogue is not transactional, but a lifelong commitment in a world of diversity: listening, explaining, understanding, finding shared goals. In Pope Leo’s words in Walking Together in Hope: “dialogue is not a tactic or a tool, but a way of life — a journey of the heart that transforms everyone involved, the one who listens and the one who speaks”. In 2014, I undertook peace-building work in the UK with a group of 15 Muslim Nigerians and 15 Christian Nigerians from the northern States. Relationships at first were tense. This was not surprising. Leaders of large Pentecostal Churches were speaking informally for the first time with their Muslim neighbours, one or two of whom were radical in their views, against a background of discrimination, and sometimes violence, against Christians. A visit to Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra’s mosque in Leicester broke the ice. A meal together, then we sat around the mosque on the carpet and Ibrahim gave a moving welcoming speech. One of the Pentecostal leaders got up and whispered something in his ear. Ibrahim, surprised, came over and told me he’d asked for a Qur’an. We instantly agreed he should have one. Ibrahim placed the Qur’an in the Pentecostal leader’s hands respectfully outstretched, palms upwards. Suddenly conscious what he had done so publicly, he blurted out: “I was born a Christian, I have lived as a Christian and I will die as a Christian [pause]. But I want to understand”. And sat down. Days later, in a closing ceremony at Westminster Abbey, in front of the group assembled in the Jerusalem Chamber, a leading Muslim woman asked for a Bible. I rushed out and bought a King James Bible in the bookshop; a touching moment, she received it in the room where the Bible’s final edit pre-publication took place in 1611. Two groups “walking together in hope” when, in Leo’s words, “hearts open, bridges are built and new paths appear where none seemed possible”? I hoped so. At least for a while. On 30 September President Trump called back his military leaders from around the world to the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Virginia and told them: “we’re under invasion from within”. America’s cities were to be their new “training grounds”. The “enemy within”, the constant refrain of authoritarian States facing opposition, has become Trump’s too. On social media, for instance, he describes the Democratic Party as a greater enemy of the United States than Russia, China or North Korea.
Trump has domestic plans for the US military. But after 22 October it is going to be a lot harder to find out what they are. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, brought in a set of policies restricting media access to the Pentagon, banning soliciting from staff release of unauthorised information by journalists doing their job. There was a mass walk-out: five major US television networks, even Fox News threw in the towel. Some 60 other journalists, from the merely right-wing to the ‘loony-tunes’ variety, described by Hegseth as the “next generation of the Pentagon press corps”, replaced them. Fraught and perilous legal judgements face the USA in the next few days. District and Circuit (Federal Appeal Court) judges are making decisions permitting or curtailing deployment of the National Guard in three Democrat and one Republican-led States: Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland and Memphis. Much hinges on a legal requirement that State Governors call for their deployment. Trump, like Eisenhower and Kennedy with very different circumstances and intentions – namely desegregation - has called on an 1807 Insurrection Law to justify intervention. Federal judges are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. They don’t necessarily do what Trump wants. On 4 October, Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee to prominent Federal level judicial roles, acting as U.S. District Court Judge in Oregon, issued a temporary restraining order to keep some 200 Oregon national guard from being ‘federalized’, that is put under the President’s control and going onto Portland’s streets. The Trump administration promptly sent 200 members of the California National Guard to Oregon, and there were plans to send hundreds more from Texas. In an emergency hearing, Judge Immergut issued a second restraining order - for a shorter time – for National Guard troops from anywhere in the USA deploying to Oregon. A court of the 3rd Circuit in Chicago came back with a similar decision supporting their local authorities. But on 20 October a three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a majority decision, stayed Immergut’s first order saying she was in error. The lawsuits continue. Trump had first declared a 30 day ‘emergency’ in August in Washington DC deploying 300 National Guard troops onto the streets to deal with “out of control crime”. Republican governors then sent their own National Guard to reinforce them. In reality crime had been falling. Some 2,500 National Guards still remain at the ready in Washington after the Emergency expired.. In the case of Portland, Trump’s absurd reason was the city was ‘on fire’ and supposedly 'a war zone'. This Goebbels-grade falsehood was partly based on Fox News showing a small, group of demonstrators outside the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) facility on the Portland south waterfront. This was interspersed with video clips from 2020 when Portland actually did experience growing riots and vandalism in the streets after the murder of George Floyd. There were also Republican videos circulating using clips from Latin American riots as disinformation. There was nothing prosaic about the streets around the Portland ICE Sunday 12 October. Unless the local TV station's websites, KGW.com or KOIN.com were engaging in remarkably creative fake news, there was the World Naked Bike Ride happening, an annual Portland event, and quite a large collection of demonstrators dressed as frogs, bananas, and giraffes holding a costume protest party of sorts against ICE. A war zone it was not. In Judge Immergut’s words: "the President's determination is simply untethered to the facts." Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar who served in a number of Federal posts, and from 2020-2021 as White House senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights, spoke of an “authorised blindness to facts” so Trump “can decide there’s a war when there’s nothing but bluebirds”. The background to Trump’s pressure on the US judiciary is, of course, the myth of ‘the enemy within’. Quite brazenly and publicly, Trump has announced that certain people whom he dislikes should be prosecuted. And they are being prosecuted: James Comey, former head of the FBI, Letitia James, first black New York Attorney-General, John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN and Trump’s former national security adviser. Trump’s pick for the US 87th Attorney-General, Pam Bondi, went in person to the Eastern District of Virginia to go after Comey. The chief Federal Prosecutor in the District, Erik Siebert, investigated the case, refrained from calling a grand jury (customary procedure) finding insufficient evidence to prosecute. Within a couple of days he was fired and replaced by Lindsay Halligan, an insurance/property lawyer who had been working in Trump’s legal team since November 2021. In Trump-World, if you don't like somebody, just fire them and replace them with a loyalist. And the more responsible people that you fire, the larger is the collection of ignorant, unqualified toadies. It is all very similar to the protection racket that the mafia traditionally ran on small businesses, pay up a ransom or else: management by fear, threats and money, or rather the withholding of the latter. . There are many examples of universities, companies, law firms, and the media being leaned on. A recent example is the case of CBS’ 60 minutes, not some online website, but a major media programme with an excellent history and reputation, providing in depth treatment of contemporary stories. Last year before the Presidential election in November 2024, they did a piece on Kamala Harris. Trump sued them alleging that the editing of the programme was misleading and had caused him emotional distress. CBS was covered by the freedom of speech First Amendment, and had the case gone to court, most agreed, they would have won. Dependent on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) giving permission for a forthcoming sale of the company, CBS settled out of court for $16 million. Trump and the Republicans are relying on gerrymandering and public approval of his peace-building efforts to garner votes in the US mid-term elections. Heather Honey was a Trump activist who promoted his story of election rigging following his dethronement after his first Presidency. Trump made her “deputy-assistant for election integrity” at the Department of Homeland Security. She reportedly told a group of right-wing activists in March that the President could declare a “national emergency” to effectively take control of local election administration. Straws in the wind? If the polls are going against him next year, postal voting may be banned on the grounds it was the cause of the fraudulent voting that brought Biden and the ‘lunatic left’ to power. But the most important question is can Trump rely on the military to support him if he tears up the constitution to obtain a third term on 7 November 2028. Or will it fracture like the rest of society with dire consequences? One of the anomalies of English Catholicism is that Catholics working for social justice have in the past been made to feel they are oddities, peripheral to the main life of the Church, worship, sacraments, and prayer, a troublesome add-on, sometimes vaguely threatening. Yet the St Vincent de Paul Society active in every parish and the red boxes of the Pontifical Mission Societies (MISSIO today) in Catholic households were a constant reminder of belonging to a Church rooted amongst the poor throughout the world.
Pope John XXXIII and Pope Paul VI were clearly concerned about global poverty. But the subject was not directly addressed in a discrete document by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). This was, to some degree, remedied by Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio in 1967, his Apostolic Letter to the laity and the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission in 1971, Octogesima Adveniens, alongside "Justice in the World", a document dealing with the issue of justice and liberation of the poor and oppressed, produced by a Synod of Bishops (established by Paul VI as a follow-up to the Council) meeting in Rome that year . It was Liberation Theology with its theme of “the preferential option for the poor” emerging from Latin America in the late 1960s and 1970s which brought a distinctive development in what was an unbroken tradition whose origins lie in the New Testament and the early Church, and carried forward by bishops and theologians through to the 5th century, and by Religious Orders after that. It might be summed up as a demand on Christians to make “a decisive and radical choice in favour of the weakest”. Yet, so little is done to make ‘ordinary’ adult Catholics aware of what any Pope has to say, mass-going Catholics may yet be unaware of how central to faith is Church teaching about poverty and the poor. And this is a Church which has, at least since the 1950s, taught Catholic social teaching in its schools based on papal encyclicals dating back to the Pope Leo’s XXIII’s Rerum Novarum on capital and labour, and workers’ rights. Priests and Sisters working in barrios, or supporting peasants under semi-feudal conditions, alarmed a powerful minority of Latin American bishops who saw proximity to power, dinner with the oligarchs and generals, as a sign of the Church’s influence. And some, such as Francis before he became Pope, believed they could garner some protection for their radical clergy. Others steered clear but did not speak or act decisively. Martyrdom awaited those who did. Because of its work in Latin America, the London-based CIIR (the Catholic Institute for International Relations) challenged British Foreign policy and promoted the theology of liberation from the mid-1970s. As the 1980s progressed, more development agencies and charitable bodies alleviating poverty also began advocating anti-poverty measures. By 1985 it was the Foreign Office’s opinion that CIIR’s staff were communists. None were. Alleviating poverty remained an official mission of the church. But trace the development of charities such as The Passage set up in 1980 for homeless people. Or CAFOD, the official aid agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, part of the international Caritas family in the same period. They too moved on to advocacy of pro-poor policies. Such official flag-ship Catholic charities –– could be distinguished from “free range” NGOs in more adversarial relationships with government which expected a degree of suspicion. Neither Pope John Paul II with his grudging acceptance of liberation theology’s key themes, nor Pope Benedict XVI, set out resolutely to dissipate this sense that work for justice outside episcopal or Vatican control was seen as a potential problem. Then along came Francis, a Pope who himself seemed to many conservatives – dangerously - out of control and who himself tried to demonstrate what the Church’s relationship with the poor should be. Pope Leo XIV set out immediately to act in such a way as to heal divisions and to calm Vatican and conservative anxieties. He had been heralded by commentators as a missionary Pope sharing, alongside Pope Francis, a Latin American vision of a Church of the Poor born of many years in Peru. The publication of an Apostolic Exhortation on the Love of the Poor, Dilexi Te (I have loved You) addressed to all Christians just six months after the Conclave that elected Leo, revealed that the commentators had been right. Dilexi Te develops a document Francis had been preparing before he died. Even the title had been chosen by Pope Francis, to follow his – longer – encyclical published in October 2024, Dilexi Nos (He loved Us). Leo indicates his intentions quoting from Dilexi Nos in the second paragraph, writing that in contemplation of the love of Christ “we too are inspired to be more attentive to the sufferings and needs of others, and confirmed in our efforts to share in his work of liberation [my italics] as instruments for the spread of his love”. His intention is continuity as much as dispelling any idea of incompatibility between popular piety, traditional Christian practice and work for justice. At 20,000 words Dilexi Te is more user-friendly, the language clearer than papal writings before Francis. Popular movements are affirmed. Solidarity “also means fighting against structural causes of poverty and injustice: of lack of work, land and housing” and denial of rights. This demands working “with the poor not for the poor” - re-iterating the theme of the poor as subjects of their own history which is so distinctive in liberation theology. Pope Leo charts in detail how the Church’s option for the poor runs throughout history. He discusses the role of education in the eradication of poverty, the extraordinary contribution of women serving the poor, work with immigrants and in prisons, their spiritual needs, the importance of listening to the poor not neglecting or devaluing popular piety, and continuing almsgiving. Sharp phrases such as “the absolute autonomy of the market-place”, ”the dictatorship of an economy that kills”, “the empire of money”, cultures “that discard others” make the message politically clear. Leo repeats the Church’s call for all Christians to take “a decisive and radical choice in favour of the weakest”. But who is going to hear this call, reflect on its political implications, and act on it? How many parishes will find it even mentioned in their weekly newsletter or bulletin? How many sermons will share the message of Dilexi Te with congregations. And how many bishops will write a special letter to all parishes about it? How many mass-goers will even know the Bishops’ Conference has a website and provides a summary? It’s an odd approach by bishops to the teaching authority of the Petrine Office. Meanwhile the little and large platoons working for social justice will be getting on with it, feeling a lot less peripheral to the mainstream than in the past. Hope and joy are wonderful gifts. The hostage crisis ends, the endless bombing and killing in Gaza stop. You would not think that Gaza had seen two previous ceasefires with exchanges of prisoners and captives and a brief flow of humanitarian aid.
Palestinians have bitter grief and unimaginable suffering to digest: both genocide and a new form of Middle East apartheid. The road to their future has been obliterated. There is no going back to their past, or, for most, their homes. Jews globally face a sharp rise in antisemitism, and in Israel the loss of 1,200 fellow citizens at Hamas’ hands and, longer term, reduction of US support. Forty years ago, at the height of mobilization against apartheid and repression in South Africa, theologians saw contemporary events as a Kairos, a critical moment, one of great opportunity and great danger. For Palestine now, the opportunity is to build on the weakness of Hamas and Trump’s – fickle – pressure on Israel. The danger is accountability for genocide will be brushed under the negotiating table, the price for the peace-plan getting beyond phase one, a blow seriously undermining international law, possibly beyond repair. In international law genocide has a precise definition. If genocide charges are legally proved then perpetrators can be, and are, charged. The former President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, for example, was prosecuted for genocide and war crimes but died in prison. There are consequences even without convictions. South Africa’s 2024 complaint to the International Court of Justice, ICJ, resulted in International Criminal Court, ICC, arrest warrants for Hamas and three Israeli leaders. Netanyahu avoided the airspace of several European countries he should have flown over enroute to the UN General Assembly. The UN Independent International Commission of Enquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 16 September 2025, provides a lengthy, detailed and evidence-backed analysis of the conduct of the Israeli government and its armed forces. Both proofs of actions and intention are needed to establish guilt of genocide So, the Commission’s judgement is based both on detailed analysis of actus reus, actions by the IDF, mass killing, withholding the means of life from the Palestinian population in whole or in part, and inflicting serious physical and mental harm, and mens rea, evidence of the Government intention to commit genocide. The Enquiry’s conclusion was: “the State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure to punish genocide of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”. It was put in the following context. “The events in Gaza since 7 October 2023 have not occurred in isolation... They were preceded by decades of unlawful occupation and repression under an ideology requiring the removal of the Palestinian population from their lands and its replacement”. The Vatican responds to human rights violations and conflicts wherever they occur. So what has the Catholic Church said about Gaza - where a tiny Christian population still cling on, made famous by Pope Francis’ daily phone calls to Holy Family Church? On 29 September 2025, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, speaking at the opening of the 80th Session of the UN General Assembly, gave an informed global tour d’horizon including Ukraine, the Rohingya, Darfur, the Rwanda-DRC border area, Haiti, and South Sudan, plus a clear statement of the ethical norms governing the behaviour of soldiers in battle. He did not use the terms genocide or war crimes. But on Sunday, 17 November 2024, Vatican News and the Italian daily La Stampa had quoted Pope Francis in an interview as having said that some international experts had declared that “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide", and asking for this to be assessed. Papal statements name no names and are traditionally generalised. In a message to participants in the annual Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) conference on 30 June this year, Pope Leo wrote how he was “currently witnessing with despair the iniquitous use of hunger as a weapon of war”. Archbishop Gallagher in his speech to the UN General Assembly said “military personnel remain fully responsible for any violation of the rights of individuals and peoples, or of the norms of international humanitarian law. Such actions cannot be justified by obedience to orders from superiors”. The IDF seemed likely to be the un-named military personnel they had in mind. Caritas Internationalis is the Church's highly experienced official humanitarian body with a presence all round the world. It is rarely in the headlines. On 25 August 2025 Vatican News the official - on-line - portal of the Holy See carried an article entitled Caritas Internationalis: Famine in Gaza Violates Genocide Convention, an excoriating denunciation of the deliberate starvation of the Gazan population. Yet aside from Independent Catholic News, the Caritas statement has hardly been reported. At the level of Bishops Conferences there is also reticence to attribute responsibility and talk of crimes against humanity and genocide. Engagement with public issues deemed political is tentative except for immigration (though American bishops have needed pushing by both Francis and Leo who recently sent them a letter asking them to speak out). In the case of Gaza, there is also the Church’s history of antisemitism demanding sensitivity in dealing with extremist Zionism. The Church’s sees its role in conflicts as advocating reconciliation, attempting mediation, thus taking up a position between the contending parties, not taking sides. And language has to be appropriate to the task. But the experience of the South African Dominican theologian, Albert Nolan OP in the exceptional situation of apartheid, challenged this approach. “There is no neutral place between the tortured and the torturer”, he would say. The dilemma of Church leaders in such circumstances grows when there is reluctance to admit there are enemies. Or there is no clear idea of who or what is the enemy. Yet the language of the Magnificat, which we prayed at evening prayer at the Dominican priory in Johannesburg, is uncompromising and clearly takes sides. “He pulls down the mighty from their thrones and raises up the lowly”. Reconciliation is hard and complex. Easier to talk about in principle than practice. Reconciliation between, say, family members is different from reconciliation between nations and groups defined by different cultures, histories and characteristics. The other caveat, directly relevant and more often noted, is that a call for reconciliation can seem coercive unless concern for justice is integral to it, as traditionally advocated by the Church. As well as preaching the Gospel and promoting ethical norms, the bishops reach out to share feelings, are “deeply shocked”, or “saddened”, with “hearts that go out to the victims”. But, any analysis of root causes, who is responsible and must be made accountable, is rarely shared. Israel and its outsize American-funded military force has the power and wields it. A commitment to, and implementation of, a Christian understanding of power should not be curtailed by inveterate caution. Unfortunately, in today’s world “speaking truth to power” can damage the economy. But not so for the Church. Truth, justice, and peace, we owe this to the Palestinian people. Peaceful protest at the Gaza genocide and at the version of apartheid practised by the Israeli State has to continue. Powerful forces are dismantling democracy in America. President Trump’s murdered ally and influential supporter, Charlie Kirk, was given a five hour funeral ceremony in a packed Phoenix stadium on 21 September. It was both spectacular and unprecedented. Oration after oration, from the President, Vice-President and key leaders at high levels of the administration, fused Christian Nationalism with the Trump project.
The dominant message from a carefully crafted tribute to Charlie Kirk, mostly implicit, sometimes explicit, was that here, assembled in pious memory before over 63,000 people, and worldwide, were the Christian leaders of the world, the US government tending the ‘shining light on the hill’. Here in Phoenix’s State Farm Stadium were the representatives of the US middle and working class, the victims of a Left wing conspiracy by the former ‘satanic’ Federal government, victims all, reflecting on the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, a modern St. Stephen. By my own count at least two speakers made this comparison. So did Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York on 19 September, ten days after Kirk’s death. “This guy is a modern-day St. Paul". "He was a missionary, he's an evangelist, he's a hero. He's one I think that knew what Jesus meant when he said, 'The truth will set you free.' ", he told CNN. As far as anyone knew at the time of the funeral, - no trial had taken place - the assassin was a ‘lone-wolf’ motivated by personal grievances, yet repeatedly from the platform ‘they’ were accused of responsibility for the killing. ‘They’ included any or all who opposed Trump and the Maga project and who by implication rejected Christianity. Many – mainly - white evangelicals are Trump supporters but the funeral presentation of the relationship between Christianity and Trumpian politics was of a different order altogether. The two had fused. In a country whose Constitution demands a strict division between Church and State, a quasi-State funeral, opening with military fanfare and national anthem, conflated the religious and political. Ayatollah Khomeini might have recognized the synthesis. Trump’s turn to Christian Nationalism is strategic as well as striking. But where does this effusion of public piety by President, Vice-President and heads of key government departments come from? In this second Presidential Term, unlike the first, a thought-through plan has gained momentum led by his exremist enforcer, White House Deputy-Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller. The plan, which attacks Islam, immigration, globalization and a rules-based international order, as well as ‘woke’ culture, gender diversity, and the world of LGBTQ, overlaps with popular feeling. It aims to establish America as saviour of Western civilisation. In its traditional understanding of marriage and the family and its stance against abortion, certain aspects of Christian Nationalism also appeal to Catholics. Trump was following the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Published in April 2023, it expresses the aims of some 100 highly conservative organisations, setting out proposals for an agenda of sweeping, disruptive change, including for marriage, family, work, Church, School, and volunteering. Christian Nationalism, promoted by Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, founder of the Centre for Renewing America, also finds a place. Charlie Kirk picked up on these ideas even down to arguing that employers should allow workers to take their Sabbath rest. Trump issued an Executive Order Eradicating Bias Against Christians in February 2025, with an extensive agenda and Task Force including several government departments. Liberal and Leftwing intolerance of social conservatism had fed the crocodile, enabling the far-Right to pose as champions of Freedom of Speech. “History does not repeat but it does instruct” writes Professor Timothy Snyder, one of Trump’s fiercest critics, in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Penguin. In 1934, led by Swiss theologian Karl Barth, several Churches came together to publish the Declaration of Barmen denouncing the German Christian movement that supported Nazi rule. Article 8.24 “We reject the false doctrine, as though the church, over and beyond its special commission, should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the State, thus itself becoming an organ of the State”. Clearly things are not this bad in America today, but the supporters and language of the Declaration, known as the Confessing Church, are instructive. Opponents of Christian Nationalism need to speak out powerfully and theologically, in words stronger than ‘disappointment”, ‘forgiveness’ and ‘reconciliation’. The German Confessing Church in the 1930s is not unique. The more than 150 theologians and clergy in apartheid South Africa who signed the 1985 Kairos Document, Challenge to the Church: A Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa were a similar, less official, phenomenon. I experienced Christian Nationalism in apartheid South Africa in the 1980s: the ethnic Bantustans as supposedly national entities, racial groups with segregated churches, the legalised oppression of a national security State. In this instance, the Dutch Reformed Church supplied the theological justification. My late friend, the theologian Albert Nolan OP, a key contributor to the Kairos Document, called apartheid ‘sin made visible’. In a different context the Trump administration is parroting a Christian narrative in the hope it might elevate their plans to moral legitimacy. Patriarch Kirill’s vision of Russian Orthodoxy: blessing Russian aggression, giving absolution to the military going off to slaughter and be slaughtered, officer corps attending monasteries for injections of piety, denunciation of Western civilisation as decadent, is also instructive . Pope Francis’ description of the Moscow Primate as ‘Putin’s altar boy’ captured Kirill’s collaboration undiplomatically but succinctly. Significant parts of the global Orthodox family have criticised Kirill, led by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew who described his declaring Putin’s war in Ukraine as a “Holy War as “un-christian” and ‘shameless’, ‘better that he resigned’ than follow this path. Timothy Snyder’s twenty lessons/instructions in his book are, in the main, as valid today as they were when he wrote them in 2017. It would make a suitable, if demanding, gift to young people, preparing them for decisions they should make in a dangerous world. Tyrants, he writes, learned the lesson of the 1933 Reichstag fire: “one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission”. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) in a signature understatement, had summed up Snyder’s approach: “I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander”. That is a lesson for everyone. In Nobel Laureate and Holocaust Survivor, Elie Weisel’s words: “What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander”. Church leaders urgently need to bestir themselves and counter contemporary Christian Nationalism. It is a grave, perverse abuse of the Christian Faith that must not be left unchallenged. Christian symbols are already appearing in the 150,000 demonstration against immigration called by Tommy Robinson in London. The future of democracy, the resilience of national institutions depend on enough people having the courage to stand up in their defense. “Over-reaction, let’s wait and see” is an easy, dismissive answer to the appeal above. The reply to that is: haven’t we seen enough? If we wait too long it may be too late. “But they share some of our core doctrinal beliefs”. Indeed, but apply Matthew 7:16: "by their works shall ye know them”. See also TheArticle 29/09/ 2025 I was living in New York in Spring 1968 and recall the sense of threat that April on hearing the sound of police sirens going up to Harlem after Martin Luther King was shot, and then news of Robert Kennedy’s killing just two months later. Assassinations lurk in America’s DNA like a deadly mutant gene. It is hard to predict, or describe, their impact on a society.
Whatever anyone thinks of Charlie Kirk, patriot, pilgrim or pariah, he leaves a grieving wife, a mother and father and a fatherless young son and daughter. Along with a thousands of other families in the USA, bereaved because of the easy accessibility of guns, they deserve sympathy for their loss. Charlie Kirk’s was a short but, what might be called, a ‘consequential’ life. The tenets, themes and tropes of right-wing extremism and Christian nationalism range through the arguable to the offensive to the dangerous and morally abhorrent. During his last five years, Charlie Kirk deployed elements of the full range with great panache and significant effect, promoting lethal conspiracy theories, including an Islamic-Leftist threat to the West, modifying elements of his rhetoric keeping in step with Trump’s xenophobia and racism. Kirk added to the smog that swirls through the politics of the USA today. The key word in his obituaries is “dialogue”. But he didn’t always out-argue or outreason his opponents. Edited recordings of his debates which he broadcast widely omitted exchanges or moments in which he lost. Kirk was no Yankee Socrates. He just had a masterful grasp of political communication. Unlike President Trump’s ponderous ramblings and coarse abuse, Kirk was a smart, fast-talker who could and did direct Biblical references like a howitzer at his opponents. He built up his audience on social media such as Tik Tok into the tens of millions, worked through a variety of organisations, starring in campus debates, podcasts, talk radio, television shows, and rallies. His performances and preaching were exciting and attractive to youth, compelling for some, particularly young men, and particularly young men like himself who were without a college education. Into the bargain, he dovetailed Trump’s version of American political discourse with evangelical Christianity and, for many, normalized it. In his teens Kirk became a secular activist forming Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012, promoting the Republican Right in the educational sector with seed money from the Christian philanthropist, canny investor and Republican donor, Foster Friess. By 2016 TPUSA was compiling and publishing a Professor List of college teachers allegedly spreading leftist propaganda in the classroom, hoping either to get them removed or forced to repent and preach the far right Republican Gospel. To feature on the list being black helped. Kirk did not seem to find such witch-hunts incompatible with presenting free speech as his central political tenet. By the end of the decade, Kirk had moved to more perilous ground. In 2020 he promised 80 bus-loads of students for the 6 January rally outside Congress, though it is not clear how many turned up. He was cleared of any complicity in the subsequent mayhem and deaths during the assault on the Capitol by the subsequent inquiry. Kirk’s eclectic religious beliefs are difficult to categorise but put him amongst a significant number of US conservative, mainly white, evangelical Christians. These beliefs included: Christian Zionism, expectation of a thousand year reign of Jesus from Jerusalem, heralded by the creation of the Jewish State; a final ‘tribulation’ in which the elect would be spared the world’s destruction and miraculously saved; promoted by Trump’s former spiritual adviser, Paula White, the ‘Seven Mountains Mandate’– a ‘revelation’ to two evangelicals in the 1970s – that Christians are mandated by the Bible to conquer seven social spheres from family life to government; hence the idea that a triumphant Trump was leading the take-over of a ‘satanic’ Federal Government. Some of Kirk’s reflections were less outlandish with wider appeal. He preached passionately on the importance of Sabbath rest in the frenetic pace of modern life - reportedly - honoured by himself on Saturday, the Jewish Shabbat. In Netanyahu’s words, a “lion-hearted friend of Israel” who “fought the lies and stood tall for Judaeo-Christian civilization”, he had because of Gaza, though, become more critical in his last months on moral grounds. He remarkably described the Virgin Mary in a recent broadcast as “a counter to so much of the toxicity of feminism in the modern era”– perhaps influenced by his wife, a fellow evangelical, who was brought up a Catholic. How much the content of Kirk’s messages mattered, or was it his charismatic personality, expressing a general anger at the Washington elite that resonated with his audiences, is hard to judge. Considering Trump’s electoral appeal in the 2024 elections, exit polls suggest Kirk did draw in young men who subsequently voted Republican. Trump increased his share of young men’s vote by 8% and took 57% of the votes of young men without a college education compared to the Democrats’ 40%. In the five previous Federal Presidential elections the Democrats never won less than 60% of young people’s vote. Kamala Harris did hold on to 60% of young women’s votes. Kirk’s views on ‘toxic feminism’ do seem to have been heard - by both sexes. What next? The immediate response to Kirk’s death from his religious constituency has been to declare him a martyr. If he died because of his religious beliefs, the term is at best understandable. But the political response from the White House - linking his assassination to a ‘vast, domestic terrorist network’ funded by liberal charities, before any objective evidence emerged as to the motive of Kirk’s killing - is deeply worrying. The most hopeful interpretation is that much of the rhetoric coming out of the White House is merely performative. But much of it in Trump’s second presidency clearly isn’t. Nonetheless, this assassination has provided a pretext for harassing those posting critical comment about Kirk. At Vice-President J.D. Vance’s bidding, those expressing pleasure at Kirk’s death on social media risk being denounced to their employers and some losing their jobs. This is the same J.D. Vance who on grounds of freedom of speech ‘called out’ the UK for prosecuting Hate crimes. In this worldview President Jo Biden and George Soros (the philanthropist and businessman who has given over $32 billion to his Open Society foundations dedicated to democracy and justice) were criminals who should be imprisoned. At Kirk’s Memorial in Phoenix, Arizona this Sunday, there will be abundant sympathy for his bereaved family and lavish praise bordering on beatification for Kirk himself . The populist Right in Europe are already using his death as a rallying cry against a sinister international ‘Islamic-Leftist’ threat. Condolence is an important expression of community and a shared humanity. But it should not be ‘weaponised’. In a divided nation, the USA will be fortunate if this man’s untimely death heralds a common understanding of patriotism, peace and unity. English-speaking Catholics might have expected some benefits from a Native English-speaking Pope: a return to the good English of the old pre-2011 Missal, nothing lost in translation, promises of visits. But Leo has seemed reluctant to communicate in English. And the British are notoriously bad at foreign languages. We need to try harder. Perhaps going to Mass on holiday abroad might help. The words are in English in your head as you hear or read them in another language. Someone else has done the work translating. The universality of the Church shines out in the marvelous equivalence of meaning in the liturgy. Translation in its struggle to preserve and transmit meaning between different cultures and epochs is notoriously difficult. I remember a new, young, Belgian White Father in Kigali in near despair preparing a sermon in Kinyarwanda on Trinity Sunday. The problem is compounded when dealing with religious texts in which individual words themselves, rather than meanings, are treated as sacrosanct. Hence the deadening word-for-word translation, a malady of Vatican authoritarian centralism, once known as ultramontanism, that prevailed for many years. Contemporary translations of Mass and Missal in English grew out of the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. ‘Lost in Translation’ Commonweal. Vol. 132, no. 21, New York 2005 by John Wilkins tells the story. The Council lead to the creation in 1964 of an International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) made up of ten anglophone Bishops’ Conferences. Philippines joined later as did 15 associate members such as Nigeria with its popular pidgin English. British bishops played an important role. But the most outstanding figure was Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban, South Africa, a hero of the anti-apartheid struggle. He was appointed by Pope Paul VI to serve on the council to implement liturgy reform and was ICEL’s chairman from 1975-1991, and subsequently associated with its work for several years. Taken forward by Hurley, the revision of the 1973 Roman Missal began in 1983 and succeeded in finding a balance between preservation of the religious meaning of the Latin text and adaptations to capture English idiom and expression. American bishops did, though, balk at the inclusive language ICEL had used in translation of the Psalter. Then in 1995, at the instigation of a minority of some 30 conservative bishops, the United States Catholic Bishops Conference complained the work wasn’t literal enough. With full translation of texts under scrutiny, to use succinct Nigerian pidgin, ‘troubles dey come’. And they came. At an ICEL board meeting in Washington DC in June 1998, the new US representative on the board, Archbishop of Chicago , Francis George, arrived from Rome bearing bad news. Archbishop George had just been made cardinal by Paul VI in the same January cohort as Bishop Medina Estévez of Valparaiso, Chile, Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments (CDWDS) since 1996. Estévez was a stickler for keeping to Latin grammatical structure and word-for-individual word translation, what is known by professional translators as ‘formal equivalence’ versus ICEL’s ‘dynamic equivalence’, that is in words that convey meaning in modern language. He had supported the Pinochet coup and, as dean of the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago, been accused of informing on left-wing students. Cardinal George’s message to ICEL boiled down to four words: their work was unacceptable. The then ICEL chairman, the gentle Bishop Maurice Taylor of Galloway in Scotland, did his best to find a compromise. Archbishop Hurley tried to explain ICEL’s methodology and wondered what had happened to the collegiality and dialogue advocated in the Second Vatican Council. An angry outburst was Cardinal George’s response. There was to be no dialogue. Instead the Vatican CDWDS produced a ponderous 130-page Instruction, Liturgiam authenticam, insisting de facto on comprehensive control over the principles and practice of translation. Anything produced by ICEL had to be authorized by Rome, CDWDS staff were changed in compliance with the Vatican’s wishes and an oversight committee Vox Clara was set up in Rome by Pope John Paul II. In July 2002 Bishop Arthur Roche of Leeds was appointed ICEL chairman. That, in summary, is how we arrived at the wording of the 2011 Missal and Mass. “Consubstantial with the Father” not “of one being with the Father”; “chalice not cup”; “keep us safe from distress” not “protect us from all anxiety” and, in the Offertory prayer for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, “prevenient Grace”. The Vatican might easily have come unstuck in their changes to the words of consecration: back to the literal Christ’s blood shed ‘for you and for many’ following the Latin ‘pro vobis et pro multis’. This is not the wording in Italy - of all places. Holidaymakers at mass may notice the words are “per voi e per tutti”, for you and for all/everyone. Which is it then, tutti or multi? St. Thomas Aquinas comes to the rescue. The power of the sacrament is sufficient for the salvation of all but its efficacy may not be universal because it may be rejected - hence ‘the many’. Or something like that…. So neither wording contradicts the other while conveying a different nuance in their meaning. The trouble is we are not all Dominican scholars. This does not indicate a soft spot for slang or attention-grabbing vernacular versions. The Archangel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary “you who are highly favoured” translated, for example, as “pick-me girl for God” on Tik Tok. But Christian thinking has been enriched by scriptural texts and prayer passing from Aramaic, to Greek and Hebrew, to Latin and then into the vernacular. The late Lamin Sanneh, a Professor in Yale Divinity School for many years amongst other distinctions, went further. “Christianity identified itself with the need to translate out of Aramaic and Hebrew”, he began his 1989 book Translating the Message, published by Orbis, an important contribution to missiology. Born in Gambia, a 96% Muslim country, Lamin Sanneh became a Catholic and served on the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences. His Muslim background gave him insights into a fundamental differences between Christianity and Islam, the importance of Catholicism’s passage through, and translation into, different cultures and languages over the centuries. Muslims have the poetry and beauty of Qur’anic Arabic which they hold to be the very Words of God passed to his messenger, the Prophet, rasul, Muhammad [Peace be Upon Him]. But translation of Qur’an into the vernacular is generally felt by Muslim scholars to involve desacralization so diminution. True piety means receiving the message of the Qur’an in its unchanged original language, in Allah’s words. For Christianity, transitions accompanied fresh translations allowing not only adaptation of idiom and expression, but a development of doctrine in Newman’s sense, and a potential deepening of faith. In summary, the Council’s Documents were a development too far for the likes of Cardinal Estévez, and their implementation a source of anxiety for Pope Benedict XVI. This was what lay behind the approach to the wording of the 2011 Mass and Missal with its now jarring lack of inclusive language and rewording of the familiar Nicene creed. In September 2017, Pope Francis made the necessary changes to canon law and returned control over translations to Bishops’ Conferences. Henceforth, English-speaking bishops would approve translations - with their approval confirmed/ recognised by the CDWDS. Francis issued his Motu Proprio (an edict ‘on his own initiative’) just prior to leaving for Medellin in Colombia, famous for the Latin American bishops’ commitment to the option for the poor made at its 1968 meeting, and the first major post-conciliar expression of collegiality. A vindication of the late Archbishop Denis Hurley. But, eight years later, no signs of the English-speaking bishops seizing the opportunity offered by Francis. There are 1.5 billion native or second language English speakers in the world. There are 1.4 billion Catholics, a significant proportion in Africa, and probably some 5-8% will understand English. The Pope should speak to them in English more. We appreciate that he does not wish to project an American identity. But it is time for an English-speaking Pope to ensure the faith is available to “you and to all”, in the best, most meaningful English possible. Culture is an amorphous concept. On holidays abroad, it can shrink to what is different from home apart from not being at work , plus a few galleries, museums, and churches. Identity, no less amorphous, is its twin, sometimes ugly, sister.
Take northern Italy for example – the rolling countryside of Emilio-Romagna, carpeted with vineyards, Trebbia where in 218 BC Hannibal’s Carthaginians defeated a Roman army which retreated to today’s Piacenza. A walled city on the edge of Lombardy, once a mediaeval pilgrimage stop on the way to Rome, Piacenza today is a fairly typical largish, Italian town. Its piazzas are convenient places to observe cultural difference. All that is required is a shady seat, a cafè macchiato to blend in and a penchant for possibly odious comparisons. Italian food, notable for its regional specialties and locally-sourced ingredients, is a striking and basic cultural difference. Out of the most unpretentious café in a backstreet comes a delicious meal at a modest price. The rich everywhere can eat good food but in Italy so can most of the poor. 80% of expenditure on food is for eating at home. The quick-service chains, such as McDonalds, Greggs, KFC, and Nando’s control only 7% of the Italian food service market compared to 34% in Britain. And probably correlated with this is a worrying difference in the percentage intake of ultra-processed food: 60% in the UK against 10% in Italy, admittedly the lowest in Europe. Even the many Italian pizza bars have generally fresher ingredients and thinner bases. It is no wonder that without managing an empire, Italian restaurants and food spread around the world. We are all Europeans. How come there is such a difference? It probably has much to do with Britain’s early industrialization and urbanization changing roles of women, plus the need to feed a large, poorly paid labour force. In the 19th century, mass produced fast-food came to serve both women in mills, too exhausted to cook, and men in heavy (labouring) jobs: in factories, mining and quarrying and on farms, docks and railways. The new railways allowed fish to be moved quickly from the coast to the cities and thus make fish and chips widely available. The first fish and chip shops appeared in the 1860s and by 1910 there were 25,000 , down to below 10,000 today, serving the ‘national dish’. So important for morale were fish and chips, they were never rationed during the Second World War. Then there’s the British cup of tea. It never managed to supplant beer but we still drink 100 million cups a day in contrast to Italy’s 90% coffee habit. Sugar - and tea was sweetened - was an important source of energy for the hard labour needed in an industrial society. Consumption shot up from 18lbs per person per year in 1800 to 90lbs in 1901, the highest in Europe but fell to 44lbs average today the same as in Italy. But British consumption is skewed towards refined cane sugar, with zero nutritional value, compared to Italy’s significant intake from fruit and vegetables, 30% of daily diet. Sitting in a piazza , not in a poor part of town, so not watching a cross-section of Italian society, the male and the female gaze takes in the elegance of both men and women. Italians in the main look slender and dress to enhance the impression. The temperature is hovering around 30C but everyone, even the elderly, seems to be trying to look their best. Grandparents look groomed, some elegant, in well-chosen clothes. In Britain, during summer, except for the young, you could be forgiven for concluding most people had given up trying to look good. But how come? Italy has many admired fashion designers, Armani, Gucci, Prada, Versace. And their clothes cost less in Italy but they aren’t cheap, even the imitations. But this doesn’t work as an explanation. I can only speculate what might. Can this difference in dress be connected to our British climate obliging us to spend more time indoors, away from any gaze except that of the immediate family? Or is it some hangover from Cromwell, Puritanism and a Protestant tradition? Pre-Reformation, ordinary people absorbed the Gospel stories from sumptuous pictures on church walls and in stained glass windows. The Catholic counter-reformation was the proximate cause of a flourishing in art after the Council of Trent 1545-1563: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and the pious Flemish painter from Catholic Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens, stand out. All four artists clearly delighted in the female body clothed or unclothed, and most notably in religious contexts Tintoretto particularly captures the humanity of both his male and female subjects. The film directors Bertolucci and Fellini are in some ways their descendants in a different and secular, medium. The Puritans, our own Taliban, made sure Britain was denied this cultural experience. So perhaps visual religious culture got by osmosis into the Italian bloodstream and not ours. Finally as you sit in the piazza in the late afternoon shade, listening to lively conversations all around, hands providing the emphases and punctuation, you may compare and contrast with gloomy pubs in provincial towns in Britain. As a verbal culture, Italy seems to come somewhere between Ireland and the UK. Of course, each are fighting a (possibly losing) battle with the mobile phone. Italy’s eating habits are changing though. Milan-Bergamo airport has a large and popular McDonalds. The average weight of Italians may soon creep out of the top of the BMI index to join the UK beyond the safe zone. Obesity (above 30 on BMI scale) is increasing and for Italian men is only 5% behind the UK’s score of 30% of the male population. “A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and soul of its people”, Mahatma Gandhi once said. Agreed. And perhaps just a little bit in their stomachs and in their clothes and in their conversation. “The human spirit must prevail over technology” is one of Einstein’s better sayings – if he indeed said it. It would make a good protest banner in Silicon valley, or a classic essay topic, or the leitmotif in discussions about controlling nuclear weapons and AI, since there is no certainty that the human spirit will prevail.
There are many historical antecedents for such contemporary fears. Textile workers threatened by steam-powered looms participated in outbreaks of machine-breaking at the beginning of the 19th century. By the peak of resistance, 1810-1813, the government deployed 12,000 troops against them in Nottinghamshire, West Yorkshire and Lancashire, and made ‘machine-breaking’ a capital offence. The pejorative ‘Luddite’ entered the language meaning combative resistance to technology. Later in the century, reactions to technology similar to our own were shared by Victorians from different classes. The polymath, John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a spirited intellectual champion of craftsmanship versus industrial mass production . The Arts and Crafts Movement of the 1880s was led by the textile designer, businessman, artist and socialist, William Morris (1834-1896) whose wallpaper and fabric designs are still used worldwide. But when it comes to the human spirit prevailing over technology, there are two stories, from the 19th and from the 21st centuries, that deserve telling. Both feature that catchall for experience of change, ‘the journey’, and by coincidence feature Scotland. The technology is that of a Yarrow and Hedley steamship and a Hattersley treadle-powered loom. One was transported from Millwall docks (by Canary Wharf) to Lake Nyasa (now Malawi) in the 19th century, the other from the Isle of Lewis and Harris, in the Outer Hebrides, to Suffolk in the 21st. The explorer and missionary David Livingstone was a Victorian celebrity. He gave the name of his birthplace, Blantyre, (South Lanarkshire), to the commercial capital of present day Malawi. Livingstone’s colleague, Lieutenant E.D. Young, a naval officer, was also a missionary hero though little known today. In 1862, Young shipped out a steamboat to Africa for Livingstone. Like a giant IKEA delivery, the Lady Nyasa was transported in flat-pack form to bypass the Murchison Falls, a long and fierce section of rapids on the Shire River, in order to reach Lake Malawi. Reassembled, Young captained it until 1864. But the mission was recalled by the British government and Young left the navy to become a coast guard at Dungeness. A brief digression on a little-known use of the steamship: a colleague of mine in Malawi in the 1960s collected an oral tradition from an old man whose grandfather, never having seen a Whiteman before, had met the great Scottish missionary. Livingstone’s appearance set off a huge debate. Was this uninvited visitor a spirit, mzimu, or another human being, munthu? A spirit, they decided, would not have normal bodily functions. So they kept him under observation. But Livingstone retreated to the steamship for this purpose, and the question remained unresolved. The word used for the Whiteman today is mzungu. After Livingstone’s death in 1873 at Ilala in today’s Zambia, the Free Church of Scotland made another attempt to plant a mission in what was then Nyasaland employing a young United Presbyterian Minister, Rev. Dr. Robert Laws as a medical missionary. So Young was summoned from Dungeness to the perilous waters of the Shire river with another steamship, the 48ft. Ilala, also reduced to manageable crates full of steel plates plus nuts and bolts – they had arrived rusty in Cape Town – each crate weighing 23 kilograms. The two boilers could only be broken down into three pieces each and were much heavier. Some 600 African porters carried these crates through forest and up steep climbs around the Falls for reassembly by the engineers, carpenters and metalworkers of the mission team. The Ilala plied the lake for many years and, for some fifty years, Laws built up the Livingstonia Mission in the healthy uplands of northern Malawi. It was here that the Malawian nationalist elite were schooled alongside Kenneth Kaunda the future first President Kaunda of Zambia. This year was the 150th anniversary of Livingstonia’s founding. Inhabitants of Suffolk should not be unduly overawed by such heroism. My second journey story is, in its smaller scale and quieter way, something of an epic. It is about a journey in 2016 from East Anglia to the furthest tip of Britain by James Jenkins, a youth worker who had taken up weaving, and his wife Katie, a primary school head teacher. Their less evangelical aim was to buy one of the last surviving Hattersley Treadle-powered domestic looms and bring it home. It had taken a year to locate one. The only boat involved in their journey was the ferry plying between Uig on Skye and Tarbet on Harris in the usual teeming rain and churning sea. Starting near the Suffolk coast, driving an old Land Rover and towing a trailer, they took two and a half days to reach the island of Harris. The Harris tweed weavers did not look kindly on anyone selling a home loom to the English. But the Jenkinses had come to buy a loom that had sat unused for decades from a couple who had recently moved to the Island. The purchase was in all senses counter-cultural. James and Katie stayed on the edge of the village of Arnol on the old coastal road for 3-4 nights in a converted Blackhouse (the museum held an original Blackhouse with its sooty open fire and hole in the roof). The loom was less quaintly housed against a wall in a dilapidated shack open on one side, was rusted and contained birds’ nests. Such looms varied in weight between 300-400 kilograms. They had been told not to worry, help would be at hand. It wasn’t. Katie even briefly contemplated calling it a day and renaming their trip a holiday. But they did get the loom back to Suffolk. Then came many years restoration work in a Sudbourne Park workshop near Orford: learning metalwork, manufacturing the loom’s unique nuts and bolts, struggling with the tension of the warp, repairing and designing, and generally learning the skills of a 19th century home weaver. The old crofter weavers are still retained on Harris, but large mills, sometimes owned by international investors, do a lot of the work. Katie and James weave and do everything else, preparation and design, themselves. The final product was, and is, of the highest quality: beautiful blankets and scarfs, [[email protected].] a challenge to branded, industrialised and - inevitably - lower quality modern textiles. Livingstone and Lieutenant Young and their rusty steamship, Katie and James Jenkins and their rusty loom: both the age-old story of Humanity’s control over Metal and Machines. Two journeys, two triumphs of the human spirit coming to grips with technology. Both in their different ways magnificent. See also TheArticle 12/08/2025 |
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