From Damian Thompson

• Last WWI British soldier dies. Harry Patch, aged 111. I see the appeal of publicly honouring him; the trouble is inevitably it would be the state glorifying itself, absolving itself of an immoral war.
• Obama has made a prat of himself over the Professor Gates affair. But considering the man’s obsession with race is that surprising? As a commenter at Steve Sailer’s wrote he preaches victimhood because of race to blacks but personal responsibility when talking to whites and is miffed when people catch on to the hustle. Gates didn’t just play the race card in the incident: he flung a whole pack of 52 race cards at a bemused police officer who — so far as I can tell — was just trying to do his job.
• Enforcing the law is not racist: The view of the Commons home-affairs committee that there must be “racism” in the police because black people are disproportionately stopped and searched and their DNA held on database. Questions. Is it possible that black youths commit a disproportionate amount of street crime? And that, if so, this might — duh — explain their disproportionate presence in the criminal justice system? Does it even occur to the BBC to ask these questions?
• The new Archbishop of Westminster: utterly orthodox on the Mass, not at all impressed with Kieran Conry’s suggestion that regular Confession is overrated, very enthusiastic about this Pope, but not an ally of serious traddies. At least he’s cleaning up some of his predecessor’s vandalism.
• Seeing sense at last over Harry Potter: The Church’s Potter paranoia is rooted in Italian unfamiliarity with British children’s popular culture, and is partly also a response to agitation by American fundamentalists. It’s counterproductive, because it suggests that the Vatican can’t discriminate between what is really corrosive and evil and what is harmless or mildly offensive.
• ‘Institutionalist enabling’ is not a problem limited to the few remaining conservative Episcopalians; clericalism is a caricature of Catholic sacerdotalism and it seems it’s still at work in the Legionaries of Christ quagmire: LC still honours late disgraced founder. Also, not from Damian Thompson, more revelations on Irish child-abuse scandal. The paradox of an infallible, indefectible church, more than the seeming sum of its parts, made up of fallible, sinful people, and the difference between clericalism and the faith, are what the anti-Catholic commenters don’t get. Shut the rotten order down and hand over the perps to have the book thrown at them.

Labels: books, England, film, history, politics, the Catholic faith