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There will be many wonderful, long prepared and detailed tributes to Pope Francis. But for many Catholics his death will simply have come as a shock – oddly, as he was obviously dying – and as a moment for tears and for cherishing personal memories. Heaven above knows how many people he greeted, shook hands with after visits, meetings and conferences, how many babies blessed and held, how many prisoners, sick, disabled, spoken to with love. There was something very moving about those daily phone calls to the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza, something, I would dare to say, that defined this papacy.
Francis made both the secular and religious-minded aware of a deeply personal way of being Bishop of Rome and leader of the Catholic Church. He cut away so much of the formality of the office. It was not only his stunning workload – an example to all in their 80s - but how he modelled love, concern, and compassion in his interactions with the public. Watching the television pictures I was often reminded of words attributed to Pope Francis’ hero St. Francis of Assisi “Preach the Gospel with all your heart, all your mind and all your soul and sometimes use words”. Francis used plenty of words, easily understood ones, sometimes too loosely for his critics who clung to tradition and didn’t like his approach, nor his emphases. In words and actions he so clearly took the side of the poor and vulnerable. His great encyclicals Laudato Si and Fratelli Tutti, his repeated calls for compassion towards migrants and asylum seekers, used words to great effect. At a time when sexual abuse scandals had eroded the credibility of leadership in the Catholic Church, this mattered a great deal and gave hope, especially for those working for justice, peace and the integrity of creation. Pope Francis was perhaps at his most traditional in his conduct of international affairs, his efforts to protect local Churches as head of the Vatican State. Even in those last hours before his death Pope Francis found time for Easter greetings with the Vice-President of the United States, J.D Vance whom he could so easily have avoided. It could have been no easy matter to engage with the Chinese Communist Party, its persecution of religion, whilst attempting to stay outside the politics of a polarized world. From the crowds in St. Peter’s square it is obvious Popes have symbolic importance for Catholics. Pope Francis also had importance for what he was as a man and as a priest, for other Churches and faiths, and for the secular world who recognized his goodness, humility and sincerity. His spirituality fitted our troubled times. The Spanish poet, Antonio Machado wrote: “Traveler there is no path – we make the path by walking”. Francis taught us how to walk. And following the life of our beloved Pope Christians will emerge on the Emmaus road.
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It is hard to beat the Suffolk Coast in Spring for old-fashioned Englishness. The tea shops shut at 4pm. Big jars of sweets, awaiting Easter and families heading for Southwold beach or crabbing in the Blythe estuary, look forlorn in Squire’s tea room window. South of neighbouring Walberswick reeds are still cut for thatching. Morris dancers appear on May Day.
In Suffolk there is no church from which you can’t see another church - or so it is said. Yet ‘old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’ are as thin on the ground as butterflies and squashed hedgehogs. The words are taken from George Orwell’s wonderfully titled essay, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, a 1941 morale-booster, post-Dunkirk, as Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany. From 1932 Eric Blair lived intermittently with his family at the top of the High Street in Southwold, a prickly presence, somewhat out of place. in 1993, John Major, with a divisive vote nearing on the EU’s Maastricht Treaty, drew on Orwell for another booster speech. The then Prime Minister assured the Conservative Group for Europe that Britain would 'survive unamendable in all essentials' within the European Union. Forget Jerusalem’s dark satanic mills, we were, and would remain, ‘the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers'. Not nearly demotic enough – even then - for the tone of re-assurance demanded of politicians in times of crisis today. But change has come. Beer, (here, Adnams fresh from Southwold’s brewery), is a pleasure routinely taken cooler today. The ‘green suburbs’, and many green fields, have been far from invincible in the face of Sizewell C’s invading construction army invincible so long as the money doesn’t run out. New housing, mostly beyond the means of local people, growing numbers of workers, new roads, vast car parks and outsized trucks with police escorts, are the first wave. But John Major’s ‘dog lovers’ have multiplied, their dogs shouted at and happily ignoring them; some with up to three animals in tow. And do people even know what might his ‘pools fillers’ be? Football pools - on-line today? The beauty of Suffolk’s coast hasn’t aged. South of Dunwich, the great spread of wetlands with swaying reedbeds in the National Nature Reserve with their promise of bitterns and otters, the heathland yellow with gorse, skylarks trilling you away from their nests, woods with deer and misshapen muntjacs at dawn and dusk. Terra divina with memories of war. The pillboxes and the anti-tank traps, the forbidding forts, once ready for Napoleon, now just grim. So is Orford Ness with its nearby World War II radar stations, its atomic bomb and museum, testing site for the strength of the weapon’s outer casing. For anyone who has lived in Africa near the equator, where the sun is switched off at 6pm and you can watch a vulture in the garden at Christmas, the seasons in Suffolk are a joy. From January, a floral sequence keeps pace with the months: snowdrops, then daffodils, and bluebells, and daisies, bursting buds on the trees, grey goes to green, and cherry blossom. You can pretend the resident robin is joyfully greeting you on arriving home (and ignore it is telling you to get off its territory). And the rabbits begin re-appearing plus – locally bred - pheasants. No gentle tinkling of cowbells in Suffolk, just gunshots, a one-hour fusillade from the gun club on some Sundays rivalling the church bells. And pig noises and pheasants’ flapping as they take off on suicidally-straight trajectories, very different IQs but a shared limited life expectancy. Next, by way of other local treats, is the long anticipated food sequence: asparagus followed by strawberries and raspberries. At Aldeburgh – expensive – fish straight off the boats is available , and cheaper kippers from a beach-side shack that smokes anything that moves in the sea. The fish and chips is good too but, eaten on the promenade in the open air, likely to be shared with aggressive seagulls. As Spring turns to Summer, the near-deserted winter streets and the empty holiday homes will have filled up. Time for London journalists short of a story, and canny visitors from Hackney, to find their way to the beautiful stretch of Covehithe with its terns, curlews and sand martins, well cared for by bird lovers. You can also attend the August Fete in affluent Walberswick, holiday home for TV and movie celebrities, actors and directors. The fun isn’t so much the fete but watching the celebs pretend, with the best will in the world, that they are ‘ordinary villagers’ having a nice time. The celebs’ glitter is welcome unlike in the Walberswick of 1915 when the resident, but unrecognized celebrity, the Scottish architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, was put under house-arrest, suspected because of his accent and odd dress of being a German spy. Those were the days when the village had up to 300 boats and watchful working women, leery of strange newcomers, processed prodigious herring catches. You can cross from Walberswick to Southwold in the Summer by a little ferry. The tide is ferocious as if someone has taken the plug out of a full bath. Or you can walk west over a narrow bridge and back along the Southwold side of the harbour crammed with yachts and boats at anchor. No-one ever seems to take them out, status symbols pleasant on the eye. Walberswick sits on the Blythe estuary, an expanse of river which meanders past Blythborough’s 12th century – priory - church. Courtesy of Augustinian monks and the mediaeval wool trade, the church is the size of a small cathedral. In the roof above its high aisle is a line of angels with perfect carved swans’ wings. Too high for the Puritan Taliban to tear down. A few miles away upriver at Wenhaston a mediaeval ‘doom’ painting also survived on eleven planks of wood once topping the church’s rood screen. ( Under Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI, all church paintings were ordered to be white-washed). The Wenhaston ‘doom’ was thrown out but discovered in the late 19th century after rain washed away the whitewash exposing the picture of the Last Judgement. Some of the detail is delightful. The Archangel Michael stands between Heaven on the left, Hell on the right, holding the scales of justice, its two pans weighing salvation. On one, a single pure soul outweighing two devilish-looking souls sitting on the other. To the left are a king, queen, bishop and, perhaps, scholar each equally naked approaching St. Peter who holds the key to Heaven. A message of equality and mercy to a largely illiterate congregation. Perhaps this is mere nostalgia but you sense that, along this most easterly bump in England’s coast, something of John Major’s ‘unamendable’ Britain of bygone years survives. It’s a Britain that badly needs amending today. See TheArticle 18/04/2025
“Lesotho which nobody has ever heard of”: this is Trump three weeks ago with customary offensiveness berating a US-funded aid programme in this small majority-Catholic African nation. Unusually not a flagrant lie - at least as far as his followers are concerned. Lesotho is not desperately poor but some 35% of people in Africa’s 55 countries are still living in extreme poverty, 43% without electricity, relying on only the most basic of health services. Even though ‘the poor you will always have with you’ [Mark 14.7], we seem no longer to be with them. They are becoming invisible. You might think that a continent with annual GDP growth projected to rise from 3.8% this year to 4.1% in 2026 would receive more attention from the UK government. Ditto an export market of a projected 2.5 billion population in 2050 (world population around 9.7 billion). Add abundant rare earths and minerals sought for the information and renewables economy, and consolidating relationships with Africa, political, economic and humanitarian, should be a no-brainer. But here’s the rub. Take Nigeria, the future fourth largest population in the world by 2050 after China, India and Pakistan. Nigerians have entrepreneurial vigour seeping from every pore. Lagos has multiple small business start-ups. The Nollywood film industry, worth $.6.4 billion, employs 300,000 people churning out 2,500 films a year. But Nigeria has massive youth unemployment and comes damagingly high in Transparency International’s country rating for perceived corruption at 140/180 (higher the score, worse the corruption). Its Government has failed to curb ethnic conflict over scarce land with its persistent killing mainly of Christians by nominally Muslim and by jihadist criminals . The 4 Cs - Corruption, Climate Change, Conflict and Coups - threatening Africa’s future are interlinked. Corruption undermines an “economy as if people mattered” (F.S. Schumacher Small is Beautiful). Coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have damaged the economy and security integration of ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States). Prolonged droughts beset East Africa. So how do China, Russia and the EU, in potentially game-changing relationships with Africa, together feature in this picture? The People’s Republic of China’s complex relationship with Africa is becoming more mutually beneficial. China’s total trade with Africa was $295 billion in 2024, up 6% from 2023. It has easier visa requirements for Africans than the West, not only for those who intermarry. There is surprisingly a Congolese Pentecostal Church in Guangzhou city, services in Mandarin for Chinese Christians in some African States. Although China has done nothing to stop debilitating corruption or the coups that hold Africa back. China’s contribution to transformative infrastructure dates back more than half a century. It includes railways, Addis Ababa to Djibouti, Mombasa to Nairobi, a huge Nile dam, the 1,600 kilometres long Greater Nile pipeline, from oil fields near the Nuba mountains to Port Sudan run by the China National Petroleum Company. Chinese companies are involved in many port projects around the African coast. I remember eating Chinese dinners, unappetizing pieces of tinned chicken, on holiday in Dar-es Salaam in 1970. Chinese workers were beginning building the Tanzam railway linking Zambia’s copper-belt to the coast - avoiding South Africa - at the cost of $3.2 billion in today’s money. A major improvement on ‘the hell run’, a meandering road full of huge potholes plied by oil-tanker drivers. Tanzanians’ bon mot was “you could tell they were drunk if they were driving in a straight line”. The West’s portrayal of a predatory China and a supine Africa describes States rather than citizens. China’s African - once large - loans are accused of creating debt-dependency. Oil-producing Angola owes some $20 billion. A third of its population still live on less than $2.15 a day. China seeks Africa’s minerals and rare earths. It has a stake in 15 of 19 cobalt and copper mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The collapse of a ‘tailing dam’ at a Chinese, State majority owned, Zambian copper mine recently released a catastrophic 50 million litres of toxic slurry into the Kafue river. Over 50% of the population rely on its waters. Exporting their home human rights record, working conditions in China’s mines have been appalling – though not uniquely so. China’s autocratic regime doesn’t easily bend to popular concerns nor downgrade its commitment to a carbon-neutral 2050. China still relies on coal-fired energy generation but is making strides towards effective storage for its fast growing solar and wind generated energy, and improving the efficiency of semi-conductors used in lighting. But it needs cobalt for batteries, as well as - not so scarce - lithium, and more copper – smartphones - than in the past. China is now supporting economies with a strong digital and energy-transition component, and regional economic integration. Russia, in comparison, unconcerned about climate change, floats on its oil and gas reserves. It is particularly interested in gold, diamonds and platinum, as well as securing supply-chains for its military-political complex. The Wagner mercenary force, some recruited from prison with $3-4,000 monthly salaries, represent a new mix of predatory – brutal - military, economic and political intervention, now under the Russian Ministry of Defense. They annually plunder c. £1 billion worth of gold from African mines. African votes at the UN are a political trophy in derzjavnost, Russia’s imperial dream of statehood, the quest for equal global status with the USA and China. Africa holds great potential but US isolationism, UK ‘s decade of economic mismanagement, leave the EU, its NGOs and Churches as the principal international alternative to Chinese support for Africa’s development. The Catholic Church educates 19.2 million children in Africa in 33,000 primary schools, 5.4 million in 10,000 secondary schools, and maintains 28 Catholic Universities and Colleges. There are c. 1,600 Catholic hospitals and 5,300 health centres. And the mainstay of this educational work and health care have been, and are, the Religious Orders, most notably Women Religious. The role of national and partnering CARITAS organisations remains critical in reaching villages and promoting development. One Catholic Sierra Leonian hospital in Makeni stands out in my mind. Treatment for the poor, say for a caesarian, was paid from charges for caesarians carried out on rich patients. The nurses had on-the-job training from a skilled instructor. A German parish had sent an X-ray machine. Built from scratch by local labour, inspired and managed by a local dedicated doctor, the Holy Spirit Hospital was a shining example of both development and the preferential option for the poor. When DfID, the UK Department of International Development was separate from the Foreign Office, promoting African trade used to be a developmental priority. But African trade remains stuck on 2.8% of global trade. Though, the UK, no longer a major African trading partner for the continent, still maintains over £10 billion of total trade annually with South Africa. South Africans, of course, have heard of Lesotho, a short hop from Johannesburg, the plane ascending to land at Maseru in the mountains, the capital’s airfield. Catholics in southern Africa will likely have also heard of its National University at Roma, founded in 1945 as the Pius XII Catholic University College by the Oblate Fathers, another part of the Church’s - preferential - love for Africa. Prayers for a seriously ill Pope seem to have been answered. But will we hear his voice again, speaking from the heart, truth to power, at this critical time? It is so badly needed. For his words have often broken through the political gaslighting to illuminate truths that give hope, and could do so again. It says something when a Guardian editorial (17 March) describes Francis’ pontificate as making the Catholic Church “one of the west’s most combative defenders of the liberal democratic values”.
We are in a global crisis with the moral, the military, the economic and the political intertwined. We have moved from low key realpolitik to different forms of strident proclamation, echoing across continents, that might is right. Or to use Francis’ more pointed words in his 10 February letter to the US bishops: the imposition of “an ideological criterion that distorts the life of society and imposes the will of the strongest”. We have moved from an America imagined by President Kennedy, recalling the words of the first Governor of Massachusetts Bay colony, John Winthrop in his 1630 ‘city on a hill’ sermon , to an America looked on in shock, dismay and apprehension by other democratic countries. To the modern forms of tyranny found in Russia and China is added the bizarre political dynamics of the present USA ruling clique at full throttle. Kennedy, as a political not a religious leader, did not repeat Winthrop’s appeal “to follow the counsel of [prophet] Micah: to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God. For this end”, Winthrop continued, “we must hold each other in brotherly affection; we must be willing to rid ourself of our excesses to supply others' necessities; we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality”. This inspiring vision of the Pilgrim Fathers stands in stark contrast to the current reality, a great country torn asunder, beggaring its neighbours. Social division within the USA has increased the gulf between the values projected by political and religious discourses. Think of what Pope Francis has said about, Ukraine, Gaza and particularly about immigration: “The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all — as I have affirmed on numerous occasions —welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable”. You will not find such vision in any Party political broadcasts. Some of the US evangelical Churches, and indeed many Catholics, demonstrate that there is an overlap between values claimed by Trump and some aspects of the Christian faith. Some Christian teachings, notably condemnation of the death penalty, solidarity with the poor, feeding and clothing the hungry, welcoming the stranger are rejected whilst those on abortion and gender are embraced. But there can be little doubt that, as far of the Trump presidency is concerned, this overlap is consciously fostered and, to a large degree - perhaps less cynically after his near-assassination - manipulated. On the President’s passion for peace the jury is out. Using religion to fool the masses, as Marx pointed out, works. A large part of Christian America is willing to overlook Trump’s sense of entitlement to millions of dollars, unlimited power and sex, if he waves a bible, bows his head in prayer but expresses what they are feeling, makes them laugh, and promises to raise their standard of living. Some also seem to believe in a theology in which God, to preserve the nation’s saviour, deflects a bullet. As Europe’s politicians are increasingly discovering, it is difficult to deal with the Trump Presidency. And a no less intractable problem is how should people of goodwill approach his followers. Or more pointedly what kind of theology might bring about a hang-on-a-bit moment, the beginning of a Christian prise de conscience amongst the MAGA millions, or indeed amongst populists in Europe. These are all people who have a right to the truth, and to a theology which speaks to their condition in a language they can understand. As Massimo Faggioli recently wrote in La Croix - and in correspondence with me - the problem is not just Trump’s supporters , who mainly have missed out on college education, but also the many, particularly theologians, who seem unable to see that they have to turn from speaking to people who agree with them and talk to people who, for a variety of reasons, voted for Trump. As Faggioli wrote: “It’s not just a moral problem but also practical, that is, how to save this country.” Pope Francis has been more than willing to take the lead in changing thinking. But if the UK is typical, very little of the Pope’s teachings reaches mass-going Catholics. The “option for the poor” is a formative principle of Francis’ pastoral concern as Pope . But talking recently with three committed, active, educated Catholics, I realized they were only vaguely aware of the term. Living in my own bubble, I thought for Catholics the phrase was common knowledge. But why should they have heard of it if expounding of the liturgy of the Word takes up all the sermon time and there is never any mention of papal guidance and seldom the contemporary relevance of the biblical texts? The persistent fear of being political isn’t an adequate excuse. What could be more political than the Samaritan narratives, the Magnificat, the Beatitudes and the behaviour of the biblical Jesus, His incarnational identification with the Poor. It is difficult to find the right language to engage with Christian Nationalism, its search for white dominance and exclusion, or exploitation, of other faiths and ethnicities. Although it could be called a heresy that wouldn’t be a good start to the conversation. Without a shared respect for the moral teaching of the Gospels, it is difficult to engage with fascist-leaning populism. But here lies the rub. Trump has a powerful appeal. The practical politics of foreign policy requires treating him cautiously, sometimes obsequiously. In domestic politics, it means persuading the reluctant to go through the appropriate lobby whilst giving attention to “Border Controls”, “Fiscal Rules” “Stop and Search”, “Shrinking the costly State”, “Defense Expenditure”. Amongst our residual political values, defending national security needs much wider thinking. What greater security threat than the consequences of climate change? But Gospel values, genuine stewardship of creation, loving your enemy as well as your neighbour, defending human dignity and all that entails, and yes, “pulling down the mighty from their thrones”, aren’t often practical politics. So how to make the moral practical? The question needs asking. But the answer to that dilemma is a matter of pure faith: Gospel values will never be practical politics until Christians all around the world try, with great courage and in great numbers, to put them into practice, what theologians call building the kingdom of God. One of Francis’ achievements to date is to have built the foundations by drawing on the spirituality and practice of Catholic Social Teaching for our troubled times. May he continue. The title of my first online book of blogs was May You Live In Interesting Times, the supposedly Chinese curse or Chinese greeting. What follows is to promote my second book of blogs, recently published on my website. I needed to tweak the title above to cover the hundred or so blogs written as the world became even more troubled, from 2021 to 2025. Though a tweak does scant justice to the magnitude of the global changes that have taken place since.
Still, by way of introduction, I itemize below the themes that have been dropped and those that have been introduced. A little of what I wrote by way of introduction to the first book, covering 2017 to 2021, may usefully be repeated for this second collection. “Blogging is ephemeral. I hope that pulling together these blogs on-line under thematic headings in chronological order will increase their life span. Broaching some of these topics, getting some of the shared frustrations of the day into my website, may even have increased my own life span. Dip in where your interests lie and explore”. This new book of blogs, as was its predecessor, is divided into four thematic parts with subsections whose subtitles are indicated in this introduction by italics. Part One Gone is Terrorism. Well not in reality. Europe’s intelligence services have become more adept at pre-empting major incidents, though lone wolf attacks are manifestly more difficult to see coming. In has come Immigration with topics from the Kindertransport to small boats. Disinformation about illegal immigration, alongside accurate figures for documented arrivals, had given Leave voters victory in the 2016 UK European Union Membership referendum so badly judged by Cameron. I have pointed out government’s parallel but contradictory policies: the one keeping up the supply of necessary migrant labour for the British economy, amounting to hundreds of thousands, the other most strikingly seen in Sunak’s prolonged obsession with deporting to Rwanda those arriving on small boats, which brought on the Conservative government’s bizarre legislation: Rwanda was safe because they said it was safe. It was a good story, with TV pictures, to tell faithful Brexiteers wanting to ‘take back control’ of our borders and end freedom of movement. Popular anxiety about immigration could scupper the new Labour government. It has had brutal consequences under Trump in America. There has been plenty to comment on under the other retained titles. Blogs included within Democracy and Politics discuss the decline witnessed in both. Human Rights features new violations globally that have pushed the importance of international humanitarian law to the fore. Looking back, I’m unhappy not to have written about the terrible plight of women in Afghanistan. Finally in this section, Catholicism: the focus of blogs has remained on Pope Francis, his teaching and his speaking truth to power with creative compassion. Sadly I’ve also written obituaries for four outstanding Catholics: Sister Pamela Hussey SHCJ, Bruce Kent, Father Albert Nolan O.P. and Father Gustavo Guttierez O.P. Part Two Brexit has gone. Its multiple consequences remain, the economic equivalent of long-COVID. We are all sick of it. In has come Culture Wars, about the degradation of politics, ‘woke’ versus ‘anti-woke’, and the whole question of identity including what it means to be British. In, of course, has also come the Labour Party, its plans and the ‘vision thing’. Government & Policy remains covering issues from disability and cuts in international development aid to the Post Office scandal. The Conservative Party including its wrecking-ball to the NHS, Partygate, and the blunders of the 1922 Committee. Part Three Gone is the heading Middle East & North Africa. In has come Putin’s Ukraine War with its own prolonged devastation and death toll. Though a biproduct was the fall of Assad in Syria. In the last three years, Putin’s invasion has transformed geopolitics and the immediate future of Europe, diverting scarce resources into the demands of modern warfare. It had created a new not-so-Cold War between an authoritarian and European democratic bloc of States, with other countries expected to choose sides. Now under Trump this configuration has changed for one even worse. USA remains. Its themes have revolved around the Presidency, Biden, Trump, and the elections, Harris and Walz. I did float the possibility that US male voters might baulk at a black female President, but I thought Harris would narrowly win (having got the 2016 election wrong too). The extraordinary global re-alignment caused by Trump’s relationship with Putin and its dire consequences globally and particularly for the people of Ukraine came after publication. This will preoccupy international relations for some time to come. Africa also remains: There are still mass killings by jihadist religious extremists, those of Christians grossly under-reported. Not to mention the desperate plight of Sudan’s people, casually terrorised by two barbaric armies, a particularly dreadful example of the consequences of the arms trade. I should have written about it. There are blogs on eradication of malaria. Themes have concentrated on events involving South Africa, their role in taking Israel to the International Court of Justice – see also under the next heading - and the Government of National Unity. The heading Israel, Palestine and Iran stays, dealing most notably in the last few months with the passionate debate about genocide in Gaza. The old threat of an Israeli – or USA - attack on facilities in Iran associated with the potential development of a nuclear weapon has intensified. Part Four Nothing gone. But in has come Climate Change - which appears elsewhere, for example under Catholicism. It seems absurd to be discussing the future of our atmosphere and the planet almost as an afterthought, in four blogs. Everything that could be said and written about global warming and renewables has been said and written. Trump has delivered a severe blow to any chances of bringing it under control. But for fear of popular revolt, no-one with political authority seems open to the radical social and economic changes that are needed. Doomed to short-termism, what other hope do we have but some scientific miracle to avert catastrophe? And friends and family have had enough gloomy blogs to be going on with as 2024 turns into 2025. So, it is a relief to turn again to the old catch-all section Observations which ends the book. I particularly enjoyed writing about Dogs, Dunwich Beach and Detectorists. Unconditional love, gentle beauty, hope and perseverance. Not a bad prescription for surviving the rest of the decade. With thanks to Edmund Ross for IT work making this on-line book possible. Elon Musk’s precipitate freezing of some $58 billion in US Foreign Aid allocated for 2025 was wrong in a number of ways: morally, or as an effective economic policy or as in the ‘soft power’ interests of the USA. It is a telling sign of the times.
We are accustomed to Trump’s lack of any concept of truth but the picture painted of development aid by him and Elon Musk still comes as a shock for anyone familiar with how aid works on the ground. But this is clearly how many in the USA imagine it. Maybe the prevalence of such opinions in the UK influenced Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to transfer 0.2% from our decreased Development Aid budget to Defense, though with a two-year run-down time unlike Trump. The need for a UK defense increase itself is another knock-on consequence of the Trump Presidency. The British Government’s mantra “this is a difficult decision” avoids the choice of alternative difficult decisions, such as wealth taxes which come with greater political costs. The world’s poor will now be paying for Putin’s and Trump’s policies. What control have we taken back after 2016 if we accept military power, money markets, the autocrats and the feudal lords in California’s and Shanghai’s silicon valleys as our rulers? There is a touching faith in the free market. Right-wing politicians advance an ideological defense of unfettered capitalism in a world in which the market is increasingly unfree, controlled by the tech giants such as Elon Musk and the global corporations. But back to massive US aid cuts to reduce national debt. Trump’s acolytes point to allegedly ‘woke’ projects funded by USAID as justification. Even giving ‘woke’ the widest possible interpretation, projects that might be eligible for this description amount to an infinitesimal percentage of overall expenditure. Would funding a feminist theatre company who, amongst their performances, role play preventative health care, be ‘woke’? Woman play an important role in health. If a tiny fraction of a State institution’s activities are ill-judged, most people living in the real world would say such institutions were doing well. Then there is the right-wing claim that development aid doesn’t work; it hasn’t jump-started the economies of poor countries. But that is principally because war, systemic corruption and bad governance blight economic development. If, for example, you need to bribe your way through several roadblocks to get to and into a port, export growth is stunted. Dealing with such problems, development aid, which encompasses a wide range of interventions, makes a major contribution. No-one denies that despite foreign governmental and NGO funding for development in much of Africa and parts of Asia countries remain mired in poverty. But this does not justify suddenly shutting down a major, mitigating agency, as if it were a criminal enterprise, what President Trump called “the left-wing scam known as USAID”. Development aid makes a difference to economies. If half your workforce is fighting off malaria, or dying from it, this harms productivity. I’ve stood admiring trained senior women in West African villages, some of them illiterate, chatting to mothers as the sun went down, cleverly passing on health messages that reduce infections. The bonny babies in bathtubs were a living testimony to the effectiveness of supporting health systems, providing finance and upskilling in Africa. And HIV, Ebola (funding for prevention frozen then re-instated), Marburg, West Nile, and Dengue viruses, one way or another, can cross borders and seas. Education and good health are essential for a skilled workforce. Alongside Governments’ foreign aid, the Church as an aid-giving body has made a massive contribution in this regard and still does. A left wing scam ? The US Government’s only compliment to virtue are certain waivers, exemptions to the spending freeze. A few bits of infrastructure will be left standing amongst the wreckage of Federal foreign aid. The priorities are interesting. Most of the temporary exemptions relate to the spending of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. Since 13 February the latter has received exemption for $5.3 billion spending of which $4.1 billion is going to Israel and Egypt, plus more moderate sums to Taiwan and Philippines’ military. Compare this to USAID exemptions of $78 million for - non-food - aid to Gaza and $156 million to the Red Cross for its work during the current ceasefire there. Before this Trump Presidency, according to available figures USAID was spending a little over $10 billion on humanitarian aid and $10 billion annually on health, out of a foreign aid budget of approximately $58 billion. To date, the Department of State’s Bureau of Global Health, Security & Diplomacy has received a temporary exemption of $500 million for PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS. Launched by President G.W. Bush in 2003, it is estimated to have saved 26 million lives around the world. PEPFAR is now operating on 8% of its 2024 budget of $6.5 billion with consequences that hardly need spelling out. The waiver covers - in theory - all aspects of provision: antiretrovirals, testing, treatment and supply-chains. But the disruption already caused by a 90 day freeze, let alone the long term consequences, will cost lives. Musk, wielding a chain-saw, now a populist power symbol, is also determined to reduce USAID manpower to a skeleton staff. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is now acting-administrator of USAID in place of Samantha Power who handled COVID and Ukraine crises under Jo Biden. At midnight last Sunday, out of a total payroll of 10,000, Rubio fired 1,200 USAID staff and put 4,200 on ‘administrative leave’. Trump has repeatedly declared that the final staffing will be much less than 1,000 . Meanwhile the substantial buildings occupied by USAID have been handed over to Customs and Border Patrol, not to be confused with the humanitarian focus of the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migrants which is likely to retain some funding for Latin American countries to spend on enforced returnees. Former USAID chief, Gayle Smith , described the freeze as the “US signaling that we don’t frankly care whether people live or die and that we are not a reliable partner”. Washington DC District Judge Amir Ali spoke of “irreparable harm”, requiring – to no great effect - a lifting of the freeze. CARITAS Internationalis, fearing millions of deaths, called Trump’s proposed cuts of 90% USAID “reckless and “ruthless”. The Jesuit Refugee Service founded in November 1980 responding to the needs of Vietnamese refugees, and now working in 57 countries, described, including displaced people, how “those waiting for our support were left stranded”. They cite particularly Chad, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Iraq, South Africa, South Sudan and Thailand. Money to pay local NGO staff suddenly cut globally means an immediate halt to work amongst the world’s poorest people. If and when our children and grandchildren consult the Oxford English Dictionary, do we want them to find ‘archaic’ in brackets next to the word ‘compassion’? Will they be living in a world in which the powerful States deny our common humanity - uniquely in the case of the USA as a consequence of MAGA mania? We may not have long to find out. “Of Course It’s A Coup” is the headline of a recent blog by Timothy Snyder, Professor of History and Global Affairs at Harvard. He is always worth reading but this short piece on the Substack American online platform (https://snyder.substack.com/p/of-course-its-a-coup) is something of a blockbuster. Snyder’s proposition is quite simple. Coups used to start by the military trying to take control of key places: Parliament, presidential palace, radio and TV Stations. But now they can begin in a very different way. And a coup is underway right now in Washington DC.
Snyder’s attention-grabbing headline worked for me. Coups were one of several hazards of living in Nigeria in the 1970s. We had three in my time there. Most of the actual physical fighting tended to be around a key place like the local radio station. None were great triumphs of military strategy. One began after a polo match and a bout of all-night drinking in the club. Each coup created a tense period until it became clear that the leadership of all four of the Nigerian Army’s regional Divisions were united in opposing the coup. A split in the Army meant possible civil war. Snyder argues that in today’s coups “power is more digital than physical”. It’s an important insight. And with tech giants behaving like powerful feudal lords, you can see the consequences. But Snyder was pre-empted by the Catalan sociologist, Manuel Castells, at the turn of the millennium. Castells saw history as overlapping epochs categorized by the nature of power, how people experience the world, and how they make a living. Thus he identifies three overlapping phases of history: the agricultural, the industrial and the information economy. This last period was associated with a networked society with power arising from the control of information and data – overlapping, of course, with military power: the epoch in which we now live. Snyder paints a picture of the un-elected ‘special government employee’, Elon Musk, and his white-shirted acolytes from Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) trying to get control of financial data from the US treasury and the other main departments of State. For radio station and other key sites in the Capital read the digital content of Federal Government Computers as coup targets. Whilst in foreign policy, Vice-President J.D. Vance tries to construct a white nationalist MAGA-style network in Europe, and US Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth, thrusts the USA into an authoritarian alliance with Putin against China. We are well and truly into American authoritarian control of Castells’ information economy and networked society. That we are in the early stages of a slow-motion coup in the USA, the consequence of government by Trump, should wake up the Republican Party. That Trump has clear intent to disrupt and subvert democratic practice, return the world to a crude promotion of might-is-right, and reject social democrat Europe with its concern for the vulnerable, should wake up all people of good-will. Given the apparently unlimited power of AI and the future impact of the climate change this is both a moral and existential crisis. But these are early days and there are some hopeful precedents. South Korea and Brazil have faced a similar threat to their democratic societies and reacted effectively to counter it. Provided the gravity of the threat in America is recognized – this is a more damaging avarice for power than state capture for financial enrichment that occurred under President Jacob Zuma in South Africa – America will do the same. Thanks to fearful and supine Republican leadership, their further betrayal of national responsibility as a legislature, amongst the institutions balancing the power of the Executive, Congress and the Law, only the Law has risen to the challenge. A particularly egregious symptom of Republican collaboration with Trump’s authoritarian aims has been the Senate confirmation, despite the Democrats best efforts to block it, of Russell Vought as Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OBR), approved by 53-47 (voting exactly on Party lines). The OBR is important. It passes the President’s budget proposal to Congress, oversees the IT practices of Federal agencies, and generally oversees Federal spending. That means expenditure of $6.75 trillion a year will be passing through the hands of a right-wing ideologue. Vought is one of the thinkers and writers of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the blueprint for authoritarian Christian nationalism in the USA. He envisaged the sacking of merit-promoted civil servants and replacing them with MAGA political appointees (US Presidents are already allowed to make 4,000 political appointments to the civil service). Project 2025’s proposals are aimed at breaking down restrictions on presidential power. If Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives have been behaving like a rabbit in a car’s headlights, then some of the country’s judges, trades unions and affected citizens could be said to be setting up temporary traffic lights and red cones to, at least, slow the traffic. Some 50 lawsuits have already been filed to stop what is an unconstitutional power grab. A district judge has put a preliminary injunction prohibiting the access of Musk’s white-shirts to information held on federal computers. Some 26 USAID employees are suing Musk and DOGE in the Baltimore Federal Court for dismantling USAID without formal Senate confirmation. There is a case pending on the constitutionality of removing the right to citizenship of the children of immigrants born in the USA. Lawsuits and temporary injunctions , though, cannot halt the damage as cases bounce up the appeal process to the Supreme Court. Some have simply been ignored. The Republicans, the MAGA supporters, and the many others who voted Trump and his cronies into office have been forced-fed disinformation and lies. They may continue to see the application of the Rule of Law as politicization of the legal system by the Democrats. But that will be increasingly implausible. Americans still have a choice. Wave goodbye to the US constitution, the rule of law, nationally and internationally, or block this slow-motion coup. “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after”, Jonathan Swift wrote some three hundred years ago. That has even more salience today. But even in the Internet age, in a country with a deep belief in democracy, surely people will register the true impact of this coup before it is too late and will act accordingly. Or not. In both new or Nigerian-style coups, the risk of civil strife is ever present. In Timothy Snyder’s warning to his fellow citizens: “Miss the Obvious, Lose your Republic”. See TheArticle 19/02.2025 The crisis in America is many-sided. One aspect is to be found within the Christian Churches. At a prayer breakfast last Thursday, President Trump announced a Task Force on “anti-Christian bias” within the Federal Government, a new Commission on religious liberty and a ‘Religious Office’ in the White House. He had changed his mind about religion, he explained; God had saved him from an assassin’s bullet.
Faith seems to be rising in prominence in divided USA. But faith in what? Faith in Trump Towers growing out of the rubble of a US-controlled Gaza strip? Shortly before Trump’s announcements and with Elon Musk’s possible vast cuts to US overseas aid threatening, Catholic Vice-President J.D. Vance and Rory Stewart were debating the question “Who is my neighbour?” in the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan. Defending the US Government’s current treatment of undocumented immigrants and the demolition of USAID, Vance cited St. Augustine of Hippo’s ‘ordo amoris’: family first, then the folks next door, and then outwards, nation and globally. But according to the eminent historian of the early Church, Peter Brown, the main criterion for selecting bishops in the late Roman Empire was that they should be ‘lovers of the poor’. You wonder what Augustine would have replied to Vance. Not only does the US Government encourage citizens to believe that there is no crisis in the USA - just necessary disruption for the greater good – but also that their actions are entirely compatible with faith and religion. Mr. Google describes gas-lighting as “a psychological manipulation technique in which a person tries to convince someone that their reality is untrue”. You can smell the gas like an old London fog. Last Thursday the Jesuit London Centre and Catholics for Labour organized a webinar for Rev. Jim Wallis who in the late 1970s in Washington DC founded the Sojourner communities, and the Sojourner magazine. Wallis’ vision reflects in many ways, the priorities of Latin America’s Basic Christian Communities and of Liberation Theology within the movement of the American Evangelical churches, seeking to apply the values and moral precepts of the Gospels to contemporary circumstances. By 2013 Wallis had been arrested 22 times for civil disobedience. A friend of Senator Obama, he became President Obama’s spiritual adviser in 2019. In 2021, he was appointed to the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair in Faith and Justice at the Jesuit Georgetown University, Washington DC. A nice denial of the opposition often perceived between two tired terms used for dismissing people: academic and activist. The long-term political significance of Jim Wallis’ work mainly derives from the cultural and political importance in the USA of the evangelical community to which he belongs. There are probably about 40 million evangelicals - figures are confusing – making up about 12% of the US population, concentrated in the ‘Bible-belt’ of south-eastern States running west to Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma. In America, differences in voting are associated with age, education, gender and ethnicity – overlapping - and in the 2024 Presidential elections, the 14 States with 30% or more of the population identifying as evangelical had thumping Republican majorities. Some 85% of White evangelicals - compared to 59% of White Catholics - voted for Trump and, ethnically, Whites still remain the majority of evangelicals. In 2007, Jim Wallis was talking to receptive audiences about an evangelical movement taking a Gospel perspective on social justice, moving away from Right-Wing Republicanism. In the last decade or so this trend reversed. The title of Jim Wallis’ The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith & Refounding Democracy”, MacMillan 2024, sums up his webinar talk last week or, at least, its background. He didn’t say that America had spawned a new Christian heresy though this book’s title could summarize the South African Council of Churches’ denunciations of apartheid religious ideology in the 1980s. Wallis takes a strong-line on the Good Samaritan parable, emphasizing how it was a Samaritan, belonging to a rival Temple cult, despised and shunned by the Judeans, who rescued the man by the roadside and paid generously for his treatment (two denarii was about two weeks’ wages). Jesus’s own actions demonstrated what this teaching might mean in practice. Wallis' message: all Christians were accountable and should heed the message of the parable’s teaching in Luke 10:25-37. This emphasis on Jesus’ teaching and relationships with strangers, and even enemies, challenges the US White, Protestant evangelical community today and indeed, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference which supports Trump. In contrast, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition has been moderately critical of Trump’s policies on Aid and immigration. But how can so many who place the Bible at the heart of their faith support such government cruelty to immigrants? How can they not be writing to their congressman or woman in droves to stop Musk’s attack on USAID with its consequences for the world’s poor? Wallis reaches beyond the Christian Churches to others who are already resisting. Encouragingly, he sees disparate forces, legal, secular, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, plus NGOs and community groups coming together to oppose this assault on shared moral values. Drawing on his experience of the Black Churches and on Catholic Social Teaching, he speaks with hope rather than optimism calling not simply for resistance but for a deeper resilience. Even on-line Wallis radiates a comforting serenity. When you are listening to him, suddenly the way transactional language is replacing moral and legal terms within discussions of political choices comes into sharp focus. The American Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich (1886-1965) used the classical Greek concept of a Kairos moment for a time of great danger but great opportunity, demanding conversion and transformation. It is hazardous to make comparisons but The Kairos Document: A Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa, signed by over 150 Church leaders in 1985, responding to the brutality of the apartheid regime’s State of Emergency, comes to mind. This today is a time of great danger for Christian leadership, both in the USA and globally, but also great opportunity to speak out strongly and to act with the authority of the Gospels. On 22 January, the Archbishop President of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, Timothy Broglio, described some of Trump’s executive orders as ‘deeply troubling’ causing harm to “the most vulnerable”. There is now much more to be said. No ethical system can justify the freeze on some $43 billion USAID annually, including over £17 billion for health and humanitarian aid purposes , 2/3rds of this for sub-Saharan Africa. Where are the values expressed in the outcry against and cruelty towards migrants to come from? The Catholic hierarchy need the unity and courage clearly to speak truth to power. It is a heavy responsibility for Christian leaders to shoulder. But as politicians struggle how to react to Trump’s new disorder who else but the US Churches are in a position to defend and advocate the values of truth, compassion, justice, human dignity and equality now threatened by the current crisis in the West? Meanwhile, if you, like me, are in search of Pope Francis’ “tangible signs of hope”, or even trying to be such a sign, try tucking in to Rev. Jim Wallis’ talks and books. Answers abound. But, after barely two weeks of President Trump’s executive orders, the nagging question still persists. Why and how did he win for a second time ? This isn’t idle speculation if he is to be resisted.
The most frequent explanation of Trumps’ victory is economic: the consequences of spectacular inequality, not least three super-billionaires earning as much as fifty percent of the American population combined, and Trump’s claims that he would deal with the high cost of living. After many years of stagnant salaries, inflation experienced by millions of workers led to their rejection of an urban elite and identification with those who challenged the injustice of it all. Trump’s own resentment is real coming from his past as a vulgar upstart shunned by sophisticated New York. Populist resentment stems from feeling humiliated ‘losers’ - a favorite Trump word – living lives blighted by inflation in a world of winners celebrating their wealth. As the Irish author and journalist, Fintan O’Toole, argues, promote a shared resentment, add showmanship and self-parodying humour and you have the key ingredients of Trump’s appeal. Trump’s campaign benefited from the massive multiplier effect of social media unavailable to a former entertainer, Ronald Reagan, his more amiable, avuncular Presidential prototype. In 1980, Reagan’s campaign slogan was ‘Let’s Make America Great’, he believed in conspiracies (communist not deep-state), and somehow turned ignorance into a virtue and source of authority. President Reagan, the charmer, won the Republican heart. President Trump, the con-man, stole the Republican soul. A feature of Trump’s rallies and public performances that doesn’t get much mention is his description of America’s glorious past destroyed by a criminal elite - a portrayal which summons like a genie out of a bottle a sense of victimhood. Voicing “we the people” while speaking of the richest most powerful country in the world, one that has maintained its macroeconomic success during hard times globally, he presents himself as at one with the victims he has come to save. An extraordinary elision. Trump may be ignorant but he is far from politically stupid and he shows remarkable – frightening - skills of persuasion. In his second Inauguration speech on January 20th. we got a gala performance. Some of that Inauguration speech was old Hollywood. We had the American spirit forged by the demands of the ‘Frontier’, the scenic backdrop to the ‘American dream’, the values and freedom of the big spaces, the wagons rolling West across the prairies. Older readers will remember Saturday morning pictures, the circled wagons surrounded by fierce Red Indian horsemen shot down by brave cowboys. I did vaguely notice that, close-up, the ‘Injuns’ looked rather like the cowboys with heavy makeup and bows and arrows. At the time, all good clean fun. It never occurred to me that I was watching a fictionalized version of the slaughter and expropriation of America’s indigenous population. Trump’s uplifting, manipulative nostalgia did not include the words cotton or slaves, words which might have tempered enthusiasm for one of the origins of America’s economic success. But mention of plantation slavery, lynching, disenfranchisement and discrimination would have been a sign of belonging to the urban elite, unpatriotically ‘woke’ when the glorious past for MAGA was bespoke. Since it was Martin Luther King Day, a black pastor from Detroit, Rev. Lorenzo Sewell, did speak of King’s famous dream during the Inauguration Benediction, but only some 10 black people, including Barack Obama, were visible in the Capitol Rotunda, capacity 600 - though camera angles were very controlled. Forgive the pop psychology but perhaps a sense of victimhood and fear arises from vestigial folk memories, the fear of slave rebellion and guilt at the dispossession of the First Nation. Custer’s last stand, the Great Sioux Wars, happened only 150 years ago. It was just 60 years ago black voting rights were fully honoured by legislation. The Statue of Liberty’s inscription (opened 1886) “Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses…” once welcomed immigrants. When I was myself an immigrant living in New York in the late 1960s, you learned how to be American by watching TV. You were taught how to aspire to the American dream. Now the US government and many of its citizens are set on cruelty to immigrants who evaded border controls, and even to their children born there whose citizenship is protected by the Constitution. The ‘shining light on the hill’ that is America casts a long, dark shadow. Deep political divisions existed in America in the 1960s too. At a peace rally against the Vietnam War, held near Columbia University, a young Harlem resident politely asked us why we were there. I told him that as Catholics we had conscientious objections to the war. “Jews N*****s and Catholics must stick together bro”, he whispered in my ear and moved off. It was a conversation you would probably not have today. The FBI took some nice family photos. Yes, the USA was deeply divided about the Vietnam war but these were divisions akin to those over Gaza, not about the meaning and survival of democracy which not only Jo Biden thinks is now at stake. Cultural heterogeneity resulting from immigration may lie behind American anxiety but more likely deliberate disinformation - “them taking our jobs” - is to blame. In the first three years of Biden’s administration 14.3 million jobs were created, a 10.3% increase on the COVID years. But inflation is directly felt. The family next door getting a job – which might not exist but for Biden - isn’t. Old and newly fashioned voter suppression played a significant part in Trump’s victory. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, a respected non-profit law and public policy institute reports that, between 2021-2024, “ States enacted a total of 79 restrictive laws” suppressing voting. According to the investigative journalist, Greg Palast, an expert on controlling corporate power, before August 2024, self-styled ‘vigilante voter hunters’ accused 316,886 people voter fraud (200,000 in the swing State of Georgia alone). An audit conducted by the State of Washington (Pacific North-West) found ballots mailed in by black voters were four times more likely than white to be rejected, and a US Civil Rights Commission study undertaken in Florida found that 14.3% of black voters appearing in person had their ballots rejected. That’s one in seven, though some would have voted for Trump. Palast reckons that without such voter suppression Kamala Harris would have won in the key marginal States of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. What he calls “America’s nasty little secret” is that such election rigging has become routine. In a first past the post system the consequences can be enormous. China’s Premier, Zhou EnLai’s, “it was too early to say”, in reply to a question from Henry Kissinger about the French Revolution, is a myth: his interpreter said Zhou misunderstood and thought the question was about the student upheavals of 1968. But were Zhou alive today, he might wisely want to reserve judgement on the reasons for Trump’s second victory. Less wisely, I would highlight the years of mainly Republican-instigated vote rigging, President Biden’s damaging of Democrat chances by his delay in resigning, and the extraordinary bouquet of policies Trump offered to resentful voters who identified with, and trusted, a dangerous charlatan. See TheArticle 03/02/2025 Clandestine priests smuggled into England hunted by spies from the royal court and martyred are prominent within English Catholic memory of the 16th and early 17th century. Priest-holes, the pejorative term ‘Jesuitical’, and the exclusion of Catholics from succession to the throne, remain a minor remnant of that time. In the 20th century, Nazi Rule, Communism, and the military dictatorships of Latin America, evoke a similar memory of spies, clandestine missionaries and martyrdom. Plus ça change.
Yvonnick Denoël’s Vatican Spies:From the Second World War to Pope Francis (Hurst £25), covers the period from 1940 to 2023 . The author is a French journalist who has written books about Intelligence Services including the CIA, MOSSAD and MI6. But this new book is not just about Vatican spies as the title suggests, but also covers other newsworthy elements of recent Church history - a discreditable litany of scandals. As a historian of the Church, Denoël leaves much to be desired. We get, for example, three pages on Rwandan history and the 1994 genocide. But no mention of Pope John Paul’s repeated passionate appeals, just three days after the massacres began: “Everywhere hatred, revenge, fratricidal killing. In the name of Christ we beg you, lay down your arms”. Nothing either about the Nuncio for Rwanda in Kigali, Monsignor Giuseppe Bertello, who supported Rwandan human rights organisations and had alerted the Pope to the danger. Plenty of detail about the complicity of the local Church. But what has this got to do with the Vatican and spies? Denoël does provide many vignettes and longer, indigestible accounts of agents of Intelligence Services trying to extract information from the Vatican, Cardinals and Curial officials, bishops, priests, lay Catholics and Catholic organisations. Many of his clerical dramatis personae have dodgy friends and vulnerabilities to manipulation: ambition, sometimes homosexuality and, in certain instances, strong ideological or political sentiments. Several show considerable courage or, at least, tolerance of high levels of risk. At 434 pages, you ‘d need a spy’s training to remember all the names. Denoël expands the definition of spies to mean not only handlers and agents, and their spying, for example, bugs in the office of Cardinal Luigi Maglione, Vatican Secretary of State during the War, (phones tapped also). Spying is treated in the generic sense of activities involving collection of sensitive information through cultivation of personal relationships, or picked up in the course of their work by Curial officials and Nuncios. And there is no doubt that Church officials did pass on information to Governments and, inadvertently or deliberately, to people who were Intelligence agents. Vatican Spies has no strong overarching themes beyond fear of, and reaction to, communism and money the root of all evil. Denoël justifiably points the finger at the Vatican’s management of its bank the IOR, Instituto per le Opere di Religione (the works of religion - for which, too often, read money-laundering). Alongside good works, over the years the IOR has served the Mafia, the sinister P2 Italian Masonic Lodge, and the CIA . Chronic incompetence, naivete or illicit financial benefit? All of the above. The larger than life American Monsignor, later Archbishop, Paul Marcinkus, who was IOR President from 1971-1989, weathering several scandals, owed his career to the then Archbishop Montini, later Pope Paul VI (1963-1978), whose pastoral work in Milan he assisted financially. Marcinkus was also director of the Nassau, Bahamas, Banco Ambrosiano Overseas of which the IOR was the main shareholder. Its chairman was Roberto Calvi who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge (definitely not suicide) when the bank collapsed in 1982. Enough to make St. Ambrose turn in his grave. In 1969 Pope Paul VI asked the Sicilian tax lawyer and banker, Michele Sindona, another benefactor from his Milan days, to liaise with Marcinkus in investing Vatican money offshore to avoid Italian tax. Unfortunately, New York Mafia boss Gambino’s heroin profits were also handled by Sindona who died in prison of cyanide in his coffee. Only under Pope Francis have serious inroads into cleaning up this inglorious Augean stable made much progress. The glory days for undercover work in the Vatican were the nine months of Nazi occupation of Rome October 1943 to June 1944. Escaped Allied troops were found sanctuary. A former Irish boxer from Cork, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, confined in the Vatican to avoid arrest, organised an extensive rescue network supported by the British Ambassador, Francis D’Arcy Osborne. The American Cardinal Eugene Spellman acted almost openly as a CIA asset, funneling in money to help. When deportation of 1,259 Jews from Rome to Auschwitz began on 15 October 1943, Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, protested to the German Ambassador. The Vatican ordered Rome’s 100 convents and 45 monasteries to provide sanctuary; they hid 6,000 out of the capital’s 8,000 Jews, some in churches and some in the Vatican itself. Meanwhile, the Gestapo worked to infiltrate these Catholic networks. There were, of course, exceptions to this risky support for Allied forces and Jews. Some in leadership positions were pro-German. At the end of the war, Pius XII (Pope 1939-1958) appointed the rector of Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome, pro-Nazi Bishop Alois Hudal of Graz, to ensure pastoral care of Germans interned in Italy. But the care included organizing ‘ratlines’, escape routes for Nazi war criminals to Argentina. Like those O’Flaherty saved from Nazi capture, most were hidden in Church properties. The Americans weren’t bothered. By late 1944, their mistrust of the Soviet Union was becoming dominant. The key is the Vatican’s fear of, and enmity towards, Communism, a theological dimension of the Cold War. In Poland from 1945-1953, some 2,200 priests were deported, imprisoned, and some executed. (Over 1,800 had already died in Nazi concentration camps). As the Communist government established itself in China, out of the 3,000 priests in 1949 some 500 were expelled, 500 imprisoned and 200 were executed. These experiences weighed heavily on successive Popes and directed ongoing diplomatic priorities. During the Cold War, the CIA - fearing that the Italian Communist Party would win the 1948 elections and supporting Pius XII’s perennial attempts to infiltrate priests into Soviet-controlled eastern Europe - were close collaborators with the Vatican, if not acknowledged allies. James Angleton, CIA station chief in Rome during the war, brought $10 million in sacks partly for Monsignor Montini (later Paul VI) to deposit in the IOR, financing the Vatican’s contribution to a massive political campaign for the Christian Democrats organized by the Italian Church. Pope St. John XXIII’s Ostpolitik of detente, his warmth towards Khruschev’s family, was a new approach to an old problem. It worried the Americans. JFK avoided emphasizing his Catholic identity. But a Polish Pope, St. John Paul II (1958-2005), who embodied the struggle between Catholicism and Communism, offered exceptional opportunities. John Paul II did not cause the collapse of the Soviet Union but he contributed towards it bravely and skillfully. In the 1980s, according to Tomas Turowski, Polish Ambassador to the Vatican: “There were more spies in the Vatican than in the James Bond films”. The Catholic Church is a global communications network. Information flows through it to journalists, NGOs and Governments, sometimes for the common good. So, in Denoël’s sense, many Catholics are spies…. and a few are spies in the usual sense. While working undercover for Swedish Government against the apartheid regime in the 1980s, I had smuggled into South Africa a debugging device for the non-violent political coalition, the United Democratic Front. It featured as ‘agricultural equipment’. Well, it equipped them to get rid of bugs. Vatican Spies puts Church leadership in a discreditable light. The book is a potential arsenal for anti-Catholicism. In the words of the Mass: “Look not on our sins but on the Faith of Your Church”. See TheArticle 24/01/2025 |
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