Cross

Very cross.

I have just been shown the latest edition of The Northern Cross, which is distributed mostly or entirely on Catholic Church premises, and which would have been illegal additional election spending for a New Labour candidate from one of the all-women shortlists from which that party bans Catholics specifically, had not it (New Labour, not The Northern Cross) decided to make an exception in this case.

The ordination of an old friend of mine as a deacon for this diocese, although the ordination was in Rome, and also of several permanent deacons right here at home, received only inside coverage. For the front page had been given over to some liberal whinge and rant against the Holy Father by the Director of the Centre for Catholic Studies here at Durham.

Some of us have always been, shall we say, restrained in our welcome of that Centre, although the appointment to the Bede Chair was vastly better than we had expected. As soon as we learned that the missio canonica was not to be a condition of employment, then we had been all ready for some pathological dissident who would turn up on Newsnight and the Today programme to bleat on about the betrayal of Vatican II and what have you. Instead, we got a convert with close ties to Radical Orthodoxy. You see, miracles do happen.

But it looks as if the Directorship of the Centre, also a position filled by a Professor in practice, is the consolation prize. No wonder that they could not get the Holy Father to come here, as not only discussed but more-or-less announced. Come to what? To that. And to The Northern Cross. We have the Bede Chair to balance one of them. What do have to balance the other one?