SS Immaculate Conception

PETER HEBBLETHWA1TE UNUSUAL jobs number one. In Rome I met Alberto Castagnola who claims that his great-grandfather was the last captain of the last papal vessel. The Papal States had a navy, an army (the papal zouaves), a prison (Castel Sant Angelo) and a long-lived executioner.
A word about the hangman, Giovanni Battista Bugatti, who holds several grisly records: he held office from 1796 to 1864 and despatched 516 into the next world. I digress.
You might expect the Vatican vessel to be called the Barque of Peter. But no, when the champagne was broken on the bows, the Cardinal Prefect performatively uttered "I name this ship the Immaculate Conception."
By 1870 when Alberto's greatgrandfather relinquished his
command, it was a battered old tub that belied its noble name. The SS (Sacred Ship) Immaculate Conception went unarmed.
You might think that was for evangelical reasons. Wrong again. When the ship was acquiredfrom the French in the 1830s — possibly so that Pio Nono could make a quick getaway come the revolution — it had guns all right.
But when the pious pontifical skipper discovered the slogan of the French revolution, liberte; egalite; fraternite'engraved upon the cannons, he threw them overboard, preferring to be defenceless rather than infected.
In 1871 Alberto's greatgrandfather, now shipless and rudderless, applied for compensation to the new Italian government. If I understood the story, the capitano got one thousand lire compensation, while the cabin-boy got only ten. The cabin-boy was his grand fat her.
WHY, by the way, Pio Nono, Italian-style? Was it more ultramontane to call him this? Fr Faber, the one who wrote the anful hymns ("Oh happy pyx, oh happy pyx/ Where Jesus cloth his dwelling fix") thought proper Catholics should address Our Lady as Mamma Mia. A convert, you see.
Pip Nona wrote the first social encyclical. Called Nostis et Nobiscum it explained that the "present social order" was willed by divine providence. Any attempt by the poor to improve their lot was gravely sinful. So why does everyone, including Pope John Paul II, say Rerum Novarum was "the first social encyclical"? I think I know the answer.
HANS Ming bristled. Someone at the press conference to launch his new book, Global Responsibility, described hint as "a renegade Catholic".
By now thoroughly bristletoed, the critic essayed "dissident" or "maverick". Ming said he didn't know what "maverick" meant. I should have said it meant "a young bull that would not run with the herd". In the end Kling said his preferred self-description was a member of the "loyal opposition".
I think Fr Hans Kling — he is after all a priest in good standing — may be said to have demonstrated his loyalty more than ten years on. What really got him into trouble was a preface to August Hasler's How the Pope became Infallible. Hasler was a fellowpriest and Swiss. His book was an account of how Vatican I was "rigged".
One can say of Hasler's book what Patrick McGrath said of Hans Kiing's Infallible? It it can be refuted, then go ahead and refute it; if it cannot be refuted, then you have no business condemning it.
Anyway. the time has come for everyone to grow up. Hans pointed out how mild his condemnation was. Even his "good friend" Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger would not have wanted him forcibly laicised or excommunicated. There were no grounds for that.
The next pope should make him a cardinal, and put him in charge of the Council for InterReligious Dialogue. He met its president, Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze, at Windsor Castle. Annie welcomed Fr Kung and said how much he liked his books on nonChristian religions.
Cardinal Ratzinger still has not forgiven Kfing for a remark he made while they were still colleagues in the University of Tfibingen. "If you want to be a cardinal today," said Kfing darkly, "you have to start practising early."
ALL good interviewers respect. the rule that you shouldn't crush an inexperienced interviewee. That may explain why Anthony Clare, when he got Dr George Carey in his psychiatrist's chair, proved remarkably deferential for a psychiatrist, a Catholic and an Irishman.
My first thought was that it was folly to give your first serious television interview to such a programme. Psychiatrists are not interested in what you say so much as in what you don't say. They want to know your hidden agenda.
But in fact Or Clare behaved more like a good TV interviewer than a psychiatrist. Perhaps he felt a little bit sorry for the new Archbishop of Canterbury. I did. His explanation of why he had talked of heresy was that "I sometimes use vivid, colourful lanaguage".
What a feeble excuse. Heresy is neither vivid nor colourful: it cuts precise as a lancet.
All Dr Carey's explanations have made matters worse. He should have followed Denis Healey's advice: "there's only one thing to do when you get into a hole: stop digging". Carey's efforts to dig himself out have caused the sides of his hole to crumble.
It's a pity because his original point could have called the bluff of the Anglo-Catholic opponents of women's ordination. He did not say that all opponents of women's ordination are "in heresy". He said that those who opposed women's ordination on the grounds that a woman could not represent the whole of humanity were in heresy.
Not only is that a very different thing, it is also true. So the church has not been "in heresy" all through the centuries because it had not raised this question at all. If you never have to think about the ordination of women and never have to justify the ordination of males only, then you do not give this duff answer because you have never even asked the question.
Once it is asked, the "theological" case against the ordination of women begins to look pretty feeble. If Dr Carey had explained himself in this way, then he could have challenged the Anglo-Catholics to follow William Oddie down the path to Rome.
They won't go, of course. They're just trying to put the frighteners on the new archbishop.
He should learn from the increasingly wily Cardinal Basil Hume. Asked by Diana Hinds
of The Independent for his thoughts on women's ordination, he boldly replied: "the official teaching is that
there is no objective indication that it is the will of God that women should be ordained priests . . . and I phrase that very carefully." Yes, indeed.