Unsettling journalism from Panorama
There was a rather unsettling piece of journalism from Panorama this week. But, unlike that programme’s best offerings, it unsettled for the wrong reasons. Where’s Our Aid Money Gone? was very shaky journalism. It was pegged to a fund-raising meeting of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria in Washington on Tuesday which aimed to raise $15 billion to support its work for the next three years. The British government has already pledged $1bn of that.
The central premise of the programme was that something was seriously amiss at the Global Fund. It made allegations of fraud and suggested the Fund’s chief inspector had been sacked because he was too diligent in uncovering corruption. The trouble was that it failed to establish either of these facts but threw a lot of mud in the process.
The first sign that something was wrong came with reporter Richard Bilton’s criticism of the model of international donors using local organisations to deliver services. This, he pointed out, came with risks – because money might go astray. True. But what he didn’t says is that the opposite model, bringing in expats to do everything, brings the far greater risk that gains on the ground are not sustainable once the foreigners have gone.
Next it failed to set its report in a proper context. One of Panorama’s own expert witnesses, Amanda Glassman of the Centre for Global Development think-tank, had to resort to a blog to point out that in the programme’s prime example, in Cambodia, “the total amount of misused funds was modest – $431,567 out of $86.9 million” the Fund dispersed in that country.
Then Mr Bilton compared a draft report into the alleged fraud, by the Fund’s own investigators, with the final report the Fund published. A number of serious allegations were dropped in the published version. This was clearly a cover-up, Panorama suggested. Perhaps it was.
Or perhaps it was simply that senior Fund officials and lawyers found that the investigators’ allegations were not backed by sufficient evidence – a process familiar enough to any reporter whose editor pronounces that the facts are too thin to print a putative story.
The irony was that the primary evidence against the Global Fund was information which had been turned up by its own internal monitoring processes. The Fund has suspended two companies for paying improper commissions and increased scrutiny in Cambodia.
Panorama’s criticisms of Fund investigations elsewhere could only be that they were taking too long to conduct – despite the fact that in the country at the top of the list of inquiries, Niger, is at war. Again as Ms Glassman concluded: “The Global Fund’s continued commitment to open investigations and reporting should be praised, not slammed, and improvements should be encouraged”.
The most egregious fault of the documentary was naiveté. Money does go astray in aid operations and it is an important function of journalism to investigate that. But responsible journalism sets that in proportion. This programme opened with ad hominem attacks on the Global Fund’s chief promoters, the rock star Bono and the politician Tony Blair, and with the curious suggestion that the Fund has “only” saved four to five million lives not the 8.7m claimed by the World Health organisation.
Its tabloid title Where’s Our Aid Money Gone? invited viewers to generalise from the particular which, as a visit to Twitter revealed, a number did. “Panorama makes me seriously doubt that money given to charities ever gets there,” said one Twit. “Corruption damages trust,” Mr Bilton concluded. So does dubious journalism.
Paul Vallely is a Senior Fellow at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester.
from The Church Times
FollowNelson Mandela was a man, always, of his time. Yet he was, paradoxically, one who in some ways stood apart from – and even above – that time. It was in this that his greatness lay.
Mr Mandela, who died yesterday, aged 95, was a towering figure in the 20th century. He did not just bestride the continent of Africa but became a political colossus of the entire world stage.
Yet he was more even than that. The magnanimity he displayed, as the white rule of apartheid crumbled in his native South Africa in 1990, created a paradigm shift in what was possible – or even thinkable – in modern politics.
Because of those extraordinary personal qualities, the name of Nelson Mandela sits as comfortably in a litany of his century’s great spiritual leaders – like Ghandi and Martin Luther King – as it does among the 20th century’s iconic political figures, like Lenin, Churchill, Mao and Gorbachev, who shaped the destiny of their nations.
Mandela’s name adds lustre, too, to a catalogue of Nobel Peace Prize laureates which includes Albert Schweitzer, Mother Theresa, Aung San Suu Kyi, Lech Walesa and the Dalai Lama.
But, though some have characterised him as a kind of secular saint, throughout his career he demonstrated a distinct combination of visionary imagination and fine political judgement. “I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying,” he once observed, with a touch of asperity. He was no holy fool but a holy sage. He brought together integrity and calculation in a singular political package.
From the beginning of his public life he demonstrated a paradoxical combination: being of of his time and yet leading it on toward a better future. He was born the hereditary successor to a Tembu chiefdom but renounced it on his father’s death to become a lawyer. “I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth,” he later wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. “But a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people.”
The systematic oppression of the black majority by a white minority in South Africa led him to join the African National Congress and engage in 15 years of activist opposition to apartheid after it was introduced in 1948. It was only when the ANC was banned in 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre of March 1960 – in which South African police opened fire on a peaceful crowd of black protesters, killing 69 people – that Mandela argued for the setting up of a military wing of the ANC.
When Mandela was put on trial for plotting to overthrow the government by violence in 1963 he made a statement from the dock which echoed round the world. It did not save him from prison. But over the next 27 years which he spent in jail, studying for a London law degree by post, his international reputation grew steadily. “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world,” he later said.
Obituary of Nelson Mandela: Through his chains it was as if we were all enslaved, and through his extraordinary magnanimity he freed the world
“Rwanda is our nightmare, South Africa is our dream”. So wrote the Nobel Prize winning African novelist Wole Soyinka in 1994. It was just a month after two events which seemed to span the polarities of despair and hope so many saw in the continent of Africa in the post-independence era. In Rwanda a million people had died in a ghastly genocide. But South Africa had made an astonishingly peaceful transition from oppressive white rule to a black-majority government elected in the country’s first free elections ever – and it had done so under the guidance of one extraordinary man.
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela embodied not only enormous political sagacity but also an almost saintly capacity for magnanimity, forgiveness and reconciliation. Despite 27 long years in jail at the behest of his white enemies his conduct and temperament, both inside and when he was eventually freed, earned him an unparalleled moral authority among blacks and whites alike.
His very name ought to have given a clue to the background and influences which formed him as one of the seminal figures of 20th century history. His forename was Rolihlahla which in the tongue of his native Xhosa tribe means “troublemaker”. His family name, Mandela, like his clan name, Madiba – which became the affectionate term by which he was known in his later years as father of his nation – revealed him to be a member of the family of the paramount chief of the Thembu people, to whom his father was chief councillor in the rural Transkei, the homeland of the Xhosas in the Eastern cape province.
There he was born on 18 July 1918 and there he was imbued with strong sense of both tribal pride and of the responsibility of leadership. A teacher at a local Methodist school, where he was baptised by his devout Christian parents, gave him the forename of Nelson after a great military leader from across the seas, it being the missionary custom to give exemplary English names to all the African boys.
When he was just 12, his father died and Mandela went to live with the paramount chief himself. The young Nelson watched the great man dispensing justice, which gave him an early interest in the law. He was an astute and able student and after the Methodist high school when to the black university college of Fort Hare, where he met the man who was to become his closest friend and political ally, Oliver Tambo. He joined the Students Christian Association, giving bible classes to the local people, and becoming involved in political protest against the government’s decision to remove black voters from the electoral register – in what became the precursor to the white supremacist policy of apartheid – the idea of “separate development” for whites and blacks.
War should not be one soldier’s private burden
You have only three seconds to decide what to say. An angry soldier in front of you is about to shoot an unarmed prisoner. What words can you use to stay his itchy trigger finger? This is a question used by a philosopher employed by the US Navy in officer-training. The trainees are told they have time to say only one thing.
Unsurprisingly it is not “Paragraph 4 Subsection 2 of the rules of engagement forbid you from doing this”. The recommended thing to shout, according to the professional ethicist, is: “Marines don’t do that.” We will come to why later.
The sad fact, of course, is that some Marines do do exactly that. On Friday a court martial will meet to sentence the Sergeant from the British Marines who was last month found guilty of murder under Paragraph 4 Subsection 2 of Section 42 of the Armed Forces Act 2006. The first British serviceman to be convicted of murder on overseas duty since the Second World War had come across an Afghan insurgent who had been seriously injured by gunfire from an Apache helicopter sent to provide air support for the Marines’ patrol.
Footage from a helmet camera video of the killing showed the Commando shooting the man point blank in the chest with the words: “Shuffle off this mortal coil… It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us.” He then said to his comrades: “Obviously this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas. I just broke the Geneva Convention”.
The response, among soldiers and civilians, has been polarised. Major-General Julian Thompson, who led 3 Commando Brigade during the Falklands war, urged a lenient sentence of no more than five years because of the “unique pressures of war”. But General Lord Guthrie, a one-time Army chief of staff, said “murder is murder” and urged a tough stance against this “battlefield execution”. Pleas for clemency erode our “moral ascendancy over our enemies” warned Gen Sir Nick Houghton, the current Chief of the Defence Staff.
Ethics on the battlefield draw on two ancient traditions. The Stoics, like Seneca, have advocated detachment to make a soldier strong and self-sufficient. There is no place for emotions like anger, grief or other feelings that make a warrior vulnerable when he has to stare down death. Aristotle, by contrast, says that anger is a proper response for a soldier because he remains a man and a social creature. Indifference is an inhuman response. Righteous indignation is a good thing so long as we do not become slaves to our own anger. Balance is crucial in this, as in all things.
David Cameron must push to align the interests of English farmers and those in the developing world
In television studios the most interesting conversations often happen away from the cameras in the greenroom. That was where, some time ago, I met a dairy farmer from Devon called Richard Gibson. He had just returned from Kenya for a BBC documentary which placed individuals in what it described as “the toughest place on earth” in which to do the job they did ordinarily in Britain. He had spent a week with cattle-herders in the Masai Mara.
What had most surprised him – despite the 6,000 mile gap between his farm near Tiverton and the remote village of the Samburu tribe – was the striking similarities, as well as stark contrasts, between the two worlds. In both places the relationship between people and the environment was crucial.
I thought of him again the other day when I heard that the British government had launched a consultation on how it should spend the £2 billion a year which is England’s share of the reformed Common Agricultural Policy. By European Union standards it is a paltry sum. The total CAP budget for the next six years has just been set at £340bn. That is 38 per cent of the total EU budget even though a mere 5 per cent of Europe’s population work on farms.
The CAP is not as bad as it once was in the profligate days of Europe’s butter mountains and wine lakes. But for six decades it has been the ultimate caricature of the law of unintended consequences.
The CAP began in 1958, when the continent was still emerging from a world war, with the aim of increasing food production and assuring farmers of a decent standard of living. But its system of fixed high prices ensured that Europe was soon producing far more than we could consume.
So we dumped the excess in the developing world. That drove poor farmers in Africa out of business because they could not produce food as cheaply as subsidised Europeans could. Maize grown a mile away from markets in Africa became more expensive than wheat transported half-way around the world from Europe. The suicide rate among farmers in India skyrocketed.
Over the years the EU has slowly and laboriously reformed the CAP. Europe’s politicians switched farm subsidies away from production and linked them to the amount of land a farmer held. But that just proved a subsidy for the rich. In 2004 the sugar refiner Tate & Lyle received a payment of 190 million euros (£150m) through the CAP.
So the CAP has been in a state of perpetual technical reform. Subsidies were “de-coupled”. Milk quotas were abolished. Export subsidies were allegedly phased out. On and on the changes went. Which brings us to today.
Last week the European Parliament agreed a new CAP budget stretching from 2014 to 2020. Almost three-quarters of it is still market-distorting farm subsidy, which pushes up prices for consumers, and damages agriculture in the developing world. But more than a quarter has now been ear-marked for farmers whose activities benefit the environment. The 28-day consultation on which the Government has just embarked is over how that should be spent.
This matters for lots of reasons. Farmland covers 69 per cent of the English countryside. Changes in farming in the past half century have been so extensive that the English countryside would be unrecognisable to our great-grandparents. The skylarks and cowslips common in the childhood of the older generation may be the stuff of history to our children. But how farming is conducted has a wider impact on the environment.
By turning the Baby P case into a soap opera we avoid the real issues
This ought to be a tragedy, but we are turning it into a soap opera. Tragedy, in the hands of the Greek ancients who invented the form, was more than a way of telling a story. It was a mechanism through which viewers could learn lessons about competing and sometimes chaotic social forces. Goodness knows there is plenty of scope for that in the death of the child we have come to call Baby P, the toddler who died in August 2007 with more than 50 injuries, despite being on a social services “at-risk” register and having been visited 60 times in eight months by a phalanx of social workers, doctors and police.
Yet from all that we are offering ourselves only a savage soap which parades the failings of two women to reinforce society’s sense of safe moral superiority which is the key purpose of scapegoating. The tragic death of little Peter Connelly is becoming in public just another Sharon and Tracey story.
The hapless baby’s mother, Tracey Connelly, has reportedly been recently released from prison having barely served five years for the child’s killing. Sharon Shoesmith, the head of children’s services at Haringey Council at the time of Peter’s death, we learned this week, is to be given a payout as high as £600,000 for unfair dismissal after the case.
This is becoming a saga of competing icons. On the one hand we are repeatedly shown a photograph of the blond-haired trusting toddler. On the other the police mugshot of his mother embodies the thick-lipped sullen self-absorption of our age while photos of the ex-social work chief, snatched outside court, speak of a persecuted self-righteousness. They are only images. Reality is more complex.
But many responses are not. A relative of the dead child’s father, who was estranged from his mother at the time of the killing, told one newspaper: “She should have served much longer. This is not justice.” And yet the same cry lies at the heart of Ms Shoesmith’s lawyer’s insistence that her dismissal, in the full flood of public outrage after little Peter’s death, was “a flagrant breach of natural justice” in which Haringey Council decided not to follow proper procedures to satisfy tabloid bloodlust.
Where lies justice? We have systems to adjudge that but they are fallible. Connelly has been released by the Parole Board, which has a duty to balance the rehabilitation of prisoners against the continuing danger they represent to the public. It will undoubtedly have placed restrictions to ban Connelly from returning to Haringey, or contacting her remaining four children, and insisting she remains under probation supervision. She can be taken back to prison if she breaches her parole terms.
I was glad that Colm Tóibín did not win the Man Booker Prize. His Testament of Mary is a bold retelling of the life of Christ through the eyes of his mother. But, for all its imaginative power, it is in the end an arid and reductive attempt.
As I read it, I wondered had the author been to the small stone building hidden in a forest of long-needled pine trees high up the mountain overlooking the city of Ephesus – which is where the mother of Jesus reputedly retreated to spend the end of her life. With its soft coniferous silence it is one of the most serene places I have ever visited. But, if he went, the Irish novelist clearly failed to be touched by that.
His book begins from interesting questions. Why does Mary speak so little in the New Testament? Why do the synoptic gospels not place her, stabat mater, at the foot of the cross as the evangelist John does? In answer Tóibín takes the docile dolorsa of Christian tradition and turns her into a real woman, consumed by a grief, both tender and furious, at the cruel death of her son.
In her Ephesus retreat his Mary is impatient with the two disciples who minister to her needs and, at the same time, try to draw from her suitable details to add to what will become John’s Gospel. The problem is that her memories are of a son full of contradictions which do not fit the disciple’s desire to “make connections, weave a pattern, a meaning into things”.
Colm Tóibín has a powerful creative imagination which is lyrical and yet bleak. His psychological insight offers telling details, like the way Jesus claps his second arm to his chest after the first has been nailed to the cross, or the way Mary became estranged from her son as he changed from a carpenter to a charismatic public figure. His Mary is uneasy at the hysteria which surrounds her son’s miracles. Tóibín has no evidence for this but then a novelist does not require evidence only a convincing poetic ingenuity.
Yet much of his invention does not convince. He plays interestingly with the idea that Lazurus, having passed through the doors of death, does not welcome his return to the pain of life. But there is something grotesquely comic about his zombie resuscitation. Tóibín offers no scenes to support Mary’s contention that Christ’s disciples were a bunch of misfits – “fools, twitchers, malcontents, stammerers” – the kind of men “who could not look a woman in the eye”. And he moves the wedding at Cana to the end of Christ’s ministry and inverts its meaning, to no obvious purpose.
The scandal of a 15-minute care slot
There was an extraordinary dignity about Sally Lubanov, the 83-year-old housebound woman who told several million radio listeners this week that she hadn’t been able to take a bath for three years and whose carers aren’t allowed to cut her toenails. “I’d like to make it clear I’m in no way complaining about my own circumstances,” she said very firmly.
What she was complaining about was a system which means that carers spend the first ten minutes of a half-hour visit booking in, checking what the previous carer had done and kitting themselves out. That left just 10 minutes to do the actual job before embarking on 10 minutes of exit duties.
Mrs Lubanov is one of the lucky ones. She has switched from short daily appointments to fewer longer appointments to ensure that things get done. But those who are more infirm, and who need help with washing, dressing or going to the toilet, do not have such flexibility.
The Leonard Cheshire charity reports that 15 minute care-slots are now routine in two-thirds of local authorities. In some councils more than 75 per cent of care visits are carried out in less than 15 minutes. “What I’d like most,” Sally Lubanov told Today on Radio 4, “would be for someone to have time to have a chat, to cook a hot meal and sit down and have it with [me], for someone to take me shopping.”
Her interviewer, John Humphrys, was suitably outraged by the shortcomings of the system. But he failed to understand that what the 83-year-old wanted most was not practical care but human interaction. “I’d like to talk to you for hours but…” he said to her, unwittingly exemplifying the problem.
His next interviewee, the Care Minister, Norman Lamb, understood. The key thing the old lady had craved, he noted, was “companionship, contact with other human beings… there is nothing worse than loneliness and isolation”. But Mr Humphrys interrupted with a litany of practical tasks – having a bath, getting the bed sheets changed, having her toenails cut – which the state had the obligation to provide.
Neither man offered the solution. The interviewer’s calculus was purely utilitarian. But practical tasks are more than fulfilment of need. They are a manifestation that someone cares. The minister acknowledged that, and said the answer lay in a richer collaboration between local volunteers and statutory authorities. But he failed to accept even that will cost more than he is prepared to allocate.
We should, I suppose, be grateful that we do not have politicians like those in Greece or Italy. Far-right MPs in Athens have been arrested on accusations of being part of a criminal gang responsible for extortion, possession of unlicensed weapons and – most chillingly – murder after the disappearance around 100 immigrants. While in Italy the country is being brought to the brink of crisis by Silvio Berlusconi, that acme of political self-interest, who has collapsed the coalition government after just seven months amid moves to expel him from parliament after his conviction for tax fraud and accusations of under-age sex.
Some might argue that the Italy crisis is proof of the practical inadequacy of the fairer-sounding system of proportional representation – just as others could point to the paralysis to which government in the United States is prone with its split of power between President, Senate and House of Representatives, and its locked-in cycle of elections to each.
Let us leave arguments of systems of government to another day. What recent events have thrown up more urgently is the increasing attraction of politicians to a venal populism which is distinctly unhealthy for our public life. But it is not just Mr Berlusconi’s refusal to allow Italy’s budget deficit to be curbed, or the wilful refusal of the neo-Nazi Golden Order party to face the reality of Greece’s economic plight. It is as alive at home too, as the party political conference season has repeatedly shown.
I am not just talking here about the delusional fantasy offered by Britain’s blokeish pujahdist-in-chief, Nigel Farage of UKIP. Indeed he has been anxious to row back from the further reaches of BongoBongoland, where sluttish feminists fail to clean behind the fridge, by sacking the most populist of all his MEPs, Godfrey Bloom.
But buy-a-vote tactics have infected all the main parties. So we had Ed Miliband piously announcing to the Labour conference that in 20 years time his children would say to him “were you the last generation not to get climate change or the first generation to get it?”. His answer was to freeze fuel prices – hardly the most obvious start to reducing greenhouse gases.
Then George Osborne joined in the election bribes by promising motorists he would freeze duty on petrol so he could electioneer that petrol would have been 20p a litre dearer under Labour. The Tory party conference also heard Michael Fallon, the energy minister, pledge that proposed green taxes will be scrapped.
In the year 1206 a rich young man named Francis Bernadone was at prayer before a painted crucifix in the crumbling chapel of San Damiano near Assisi. The man who was to become St. Francis reported that he heard a voice issuing from the figure on the cross saying: ‘‘Francis, rebuild my Church, which has fallen into ruins.’’
On Friday, a pope of the same name was in Assisi to celebrate the feast of St. Francis, convinced he had been charged with the same mission.
Pope Francis was accompanied by the eight cardinals from around the world who on Thursday finished a closed three-day meeting on how to renew the dysfunctional and scandal-hit Vatican bureaucracy which sits at the heart of the Roman Catholic Church. The eight constitute a new Council of Cardinals, which one ecclesiastical historian has described as the ‘‘most important step in the history of the Church for the past 10 centuries.’’
The winds of change are blowing through the Catholic Church. Pope Francis is proving a pontiff of surprises. He may be conservative on doctrine but he is the opposite in style.
First came his grand gestures of humility — carrying his own suitcase, making calls on his cell phone, staying in a hostel. Next came his series of appointments to top positions within the church, replacing reactionary or traditionalist figures with more open-minded officials. Accompanying all this has been a series of increasingly radical statements which make clear he wants change on a far wider scale.
In an interview last month, the Jesuit pope accused the Church of having grown ‘‘obsessed’’ with abortion, gay marriage and contraception. He rejected its preoccupation with ‘‘small-minded rules.’’ Then on Tuesday, in an interview with a leading Italian atheist, the pope said: ‘‘Heads of the Church have often been narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers. The court is the leprosy of the papacy … . This Vatican-centric vision neglects the world around it and I will do everything to change it.’’
The Catholic Church runs on the model of an absolute monarchy. Its governance template is still essentially as it was fixed by Pope Sixtus V in 1588. Officials in a series of departments, known as congregations, act as papal courtiers. In theory the members of this Curia discharge the wishes of the pontiff. But in practice they often work at cross-purposes or intrigue as clerical careerists to arrogate power to themselves.
Attempts at reform have been made in the past. But they have been undermined by this self-serving bureaucracy. In the 1960s the Second Vatican Council decreed new models of collegiality which would cede power to bishops, locally and collectively in synods. Ever since, the Curia has connived to undermine the plan and draw power back to itself.
Pope Francis is launching a Vatican spring-clean
It ought to have been, for Pope Francis, a day of happiness. It was the first visit of his life to Assisi, the home of the saint whose name the new pontiff chose as a kind of mission statement. But the news came in that as many as 300 migrants were feared dead after the sinking of an overloaded boat off the coast of the southern island of Lampedusa. “Today is a day for crying,” he said instead.
Yet that was apt too. Lampedusa, the first European port of overcrowded call for many people fleeing poverty and war in Africa, was the first place to which Francis travelled outside Rome as Pope. The great saint of Assisi, who cast off a pampered life as the son of a rich merchant to live among the destitute, may be the great exemplar of embraced poverty. But it is in places like Lampedusa that the reality of involuntary poverty in this globalised world is made manifest.
As Francis yesterday showed, however, you do not have to travel far to encounter the marginalised. At the Serafico Institute, a charity for seriously disabled children, the pope stopped to greet every child – more than 100 individuals — kissing some, bending to hear a whispered greeting, embracing those unable to speak. By the time he left this first appointment he was 45 minutes behind schedule. Itineraries do not matter so much as people, was the implied message.
He was more overt when he entered the room where St Francis had stripped himself of his rich clothes to embrace a life of poverty. The local archbishop asked the Pope to say the Lord’s Prayer there, as St Francis had eight centuries before. “The Our Father?” the Pope replied. “But I want to talk about what the Church today need to strip away to emulate the gesture Francis made.”
Such myth making is part of the Jesuit pontiff’s spiritual armoury. He has struck the world as a different kind of Pope precisely because he practices what he preaches. The figure on the cross in Assisi’s Church of San Damiano – which reputedly spoke to St Francis telling him to rebuild the ruined church 800 years ago – was one, the Pope noted, on which Jesus is depicted not as dead, but alive, his eyes open to a world in which we all need to live more simply. Francis has embraced that by shunning his gold-leafed papal palace for the spartan quarters of a Vatican guest house.
As a measure of his intent to turn the Church upside down the Pope took with him the eight cardinals with whom he had spent the past three days in a closed meeting with no Vatican officials present. It was the first gathering of a radical new body Francis has set up to act as a counterweight to the bureaucrats who form the Church’s governing Curia.
Pope Francis should give us a break from this flurry of papal saints
The date for the arrival of two more saints within the Catholic Church will be announced today. So what’s two more, given the recent deluge from the Vatican? After all, Pope John Paul II, by himself created more saints than all previous popes put together. But this time John Paul II is to be one of them, along with a predecessor pope, John XXIII.
This is a bad idea, especially at a time when the new incumbent, Pope Francis, is sending out so many signals that he intends real change within the world’s biggest faith. It is not just his gestures of ostentatious ordinariness – carrying his own bags, making his own phonecalls, eating in the refectory. He has also begun to shake up the Vatican Bank, the Curia and to appoint a raft of more open-minded top officials. So why stick with the old ways on making saints?
For the first half of Christianity’s 2,000-year-history, saints were created by the acclamation of ordinary believers. It often took centuries for the authorities officially to endorse this populist sanctification. But JP2’s elevation to sainthood must be the fastest in history. His successor, Benedict XVI, even dispensed with the requirement that you have to be dead five years before the sainting process can begin.
In medieval times the delay was purposely far longer. The passing years allowed the “heroic virtue” of the saint to eclipse any personal failings in the public memory. But ever since the Vatican took control of canonisations in the 11th century, periodically tightening its control ever since, the process has become politicised. Pope Benedict’s fast-tracking of his predecessor was, in part, an attempt to consolidate his conservative legacy – and create a bulwark against what both men saw as the excesses of the Second Vatican Council which revolutionised Catholicism in the 1960s.
There is a political dimension to today’s announcement. The Polish pope’s canonisation had been approved before Pope Francis took over. So Francis will couple it with that of John XXIII, who launched the Vatican II revolution. This is a clear attempt to neutralise the political impact of the rush to promote JP2 to sainthood. The liberal “Good Pope John” will counter-balance the conservative “John Paul the Great”.
