Behind the Curtain

Or, a very long post attempting to explain how I wrestled through a complex issue; apologies if it seems rather stream-of-consciousness, not to mention long, but you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to...

Perched at the top of my Amazon wishlist, as it's been for some time, is Ian Ker's recent biography of G.K. Chesterton. To anyone who knows me, of course, this'll hardly be a surprise, given that my shelves are buoyed up with eighty or so books by the great man and more than a dozen books about him.

I've not always been a Chesterton fan; my first encounter with Kensington's greatest son was an unpromising taste of 'The Queer Feet' when I was fourteen or thereabouts, but when I was twenty-one, prompted by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, I drank deeply from The Complete Father Brown, had my mind prized open and my horizons expanded by The Man Who Was Thursday, and fell in love with the man described so ably in Joseph Pearce's Wisdom and Innocence. Whatever appearances may have suggested, I'd fallen far from the Catholic tree in my teenage years, but it was Gilbert who brought me back to the faith; his impact on me hasn't paled as the years have passed.

His combination of goodness and good sense is something that I've long loved, and I've taken to heart the radical difference between Chesterton and his good friend Hilaire Belloc; if Belloc roared like a vengeful bull, Chesterton smiled in charity and seems never to have lost a friend. Pearce's book says quite a bit on the subject, quoting the two writers' contemporary Frank Swinnerton to good effect:

'One reason for the love of Chesterton was that while he fought he sang lays of chivalry and in spite of all his seriousness warred against wickedness rather than a fleshly opponent, while Belloc sang only after the battle and warred against men as well as ideas.'

Belloc, curiously -- and I think wrongly -- felt that Chesterton's gentleness would do little for his legacy as a writer, but recognised that mere longetivity on the page matters nothing compared to the eternal reward that could be won through the preservation of his soul from the cancer of hatred.

Whatever about that, he's certainly had an enormous impact on this blog. My tagline here is adapted from one of his finest epigrams, my description in the sidebar draws from four others, and I'm pretty sure that were you to trawl through the archives here you'd find them echoing loudly with his words and ideas, perhaps most frequently his astute observation that 'it is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.' That my words should echo his is hardly surprising, really, given how much of his work I've absorbed over the years, such that I've internalised huge amounts of it, perhaps most profoundly his deeply counter-intuitive recognition that 'if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly'.

One of the most recent -- and most interesting -- books I've read about Chesterton is William Oddie's fascinating 2008 study, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874-1908; very much an intellectual biography, it charts Chesterton's own philosophical growth and the development of his religious and other ideas, taking him from his youth through the superficially ephemeral but truly timeless Heretics to 1908, the year of Orthodoxy and its fictional alter-ego, The Man Who Was Thursday. Oddie's book is, frankly, a masterpiece in its own right, and is one I think I'll treasure for a long time; I'm looking forward to Oddie following Gilbert's inky fingerprints as he writes his way into the Catholic Church, and have been glad to see him making a case for Gilbert being recognised among the saints of the Church.

(I'm convinced Chesterton's among them already, and like to think of the signed book by him I acquired some years back, resting beside me as I type, as a second-class relic of the man who brought me back to the Faith.)


Enter the Controversy
Oddie, who edited the Catholic Herald for several years and regularly contributes to it even now, is a journalist who I've long respected; I don't always agree with him, by any means, but I do think he's worth listening to. As such, I was startled a few weeks back to read a piece by him on the Catholic Herald website in which he took issue with recent comments by Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, in support of civil partnerships. Arguing that Nichols's comments appeared to be at odds with Rome and with the English bishops' previously-stated position, Oddie wondered whether Nichols was also in favour of adoption by same-sex couples, and if so, why the Catholic adoption agencies had been forced to close down, rather than be obliged to facilitate such adoptions. The ultimate question in this matter, he concluded, was ‘what does he believe? Just what is he saying, on behalf of his brother bishops and presumably the rest of us?’

Clearly these were serious questions, and though Nichols twice attempted to clarify his position, his explanations didn't convince Oddie, who nonetheless has since dropped the matter, aghast at the hornets' nest he'd stirred up and the sheer venom being expressed about bishops such as Nichols. 

I tried to follow the story as best I could at the time, chatting to friends about it and thinking pretty carefully about what Rome and the bishops of England and Wales had said back in 2003. As I put my thoughts in an email to a friend a couple of weeks back:

'... I've been trying to figure it out. In the main it all seems very clear, but there is one issue that does trouble me a bit.

I've just read the bishops' own 2004 [sic] submission where they opposed civil partnerships, something I'd not been aware they'd done, and how the submission had cited the 2003 CDF document. It seems to me that the current stance is a complete about turn. As it happens, the current stance doesn't bother me; I believe it's coherent, clear, and fully in line with the CDF document once one looks at how the Civil Partnership Act has been phrased. I also think that it's better to change one's mind so that one becomes right rather than to remain obstinately wrong.

That said, I'm having trouble figuring out whether that's been what exactly has happened. Presumably the 2004 submission was in response to a draft of the act, rather than the act itself, so was the final version different enough that we could accept it, on reflection? Or were we, straightforwardly, wrong? And if we were wrong, wouldn't it be better, if need be, to admit that?'

Such were my tentative thoughts a couple of weeks back, before I was forced to think about things rather more carefully...


Catholic Voices
Like a lot of people a couple of years back, it was with horror that I watched the October 2009 Intelligence Squared debate on the topic 'The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world'. I'd read about it before seeing it online, but even then I wasn't prepared: I ought to have been, given that it was obvious that the combined forces of Anne Widdecombe and the Nigerian Archbishop John Onaiyekan were never going to have been a match for a crowdpleasing power of a Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry double-act, and given how I'd read of how comprehensively the crowd rejected the motion, but even so, it was painful viewing. And yet it oughtn't to have been: Hitchens and Fry's predictable arguments were riddled with errors and couched in sophistry; they could have been countered at almost every point.

Describing the debate to a friend of mine who is a priest, I looked downcast as I related just how inevitable it all seemed, and how it ought not to have been. My friend nodded, and said that while Anne Widdecombe does valiant work in putting forward the Catholic case, and deserves our gratitude for that, he often feels she doesn’t help things very much. I agreed, but we were both at a loss to think of anybody else who would have taken her place. The Telegraph's Andrew M. Brown evidently had taken a similar view, ending his piece on the debate with a desperate appeal:

'It was a gripping evening’s entertainment but a little discouraging for those of us who are Catholics. I found myself wishing, one, that the Catholic debaters would for once not content themselves with offering pettifogging excuses but instead actually own up to some of the charges, and, two, I wished that there still existed a great Catholic apologist like Chesterton or Belloc, someone who was not only brave and prepared to square up to the Hitch, but was his intellectual equal. Surely there is someone today who could do that?'

I'm glad to say that not every Catholic who watched the debate simply contented themselves with wishing, as the group called Catholic Voices grew out of that debacle, in anticipation of the Pope's then impending visit to the UK. Jack Valero and Austen Ivereigh's idea was a straightforward one, that being, simply, that a team of young -- or youngish! -- Catholics could be given some basic media training, so that they could articulate the case for the Church on television or radio. I liked the idea, and had I been based in London last year I'd probably have applied to join, though given the rather peculiar directions my life took in 2010, it might well be for the best that I didn't do so. Anyway, they did a good job during the Papal visit, and played their part in ensuring that that visit turned out to be far more successful than anyone had expected.

And no, despite the shriekings of the likes of Terry Sanderson, they weren't Vatican-trained propagandists, taught to obscure, distort, and contradict arguments; they were simply ordinary Catholics, informed of the issues and confident in their faith, able to explain complicated issues in simple language. I thought this was a good thing, and if they weren't always quite as good as people might have wished, or if they made some missteps in the organisation phase, well, if a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing badly, as the man said. The point is, this was worth doing.

I suspect Terry was upset mainly because the whole Papal visit left him looking rather foolish, with his hysterical claims that the visit would cost the taxpayer £100 million pounds, rather than less than a fifth of that, being soundly refuted by common sense, not to mention evidence.


And then there's me...
Well, a few months ago I received an email from my aforementioned priestly friend, informing me that Catholic Voices were looking to train a second batch of people, and asking whether I'd been interested. I said I'd been interested the previous year, and so happily applied on -- as it so happened -- the very day that a letter from me appeared in the Irish Times challenging the Taoiseach for having made false statements to the Dáil about the Vatican.

Eventually, after thinking I'd not been selected at all -- something about which I was rather put out, though I still wished the project well as I thought it important -- I was called to come for an interview, and I was interviewed, and a couple of days later was told I'd been chosen; within a fortnight or so of that I met up with the others for our first weekend together in Yorkshire, bumping into one of the others on the train there.

I'm not going to go into how the weekends went, since this sort of thing can only work if we can speak and act in confidence -- one of my closest friends, to whom I've described them in rather more detail than I'll go into here, has said that they sound to her to be akin to retreats in certain ways, and I think she's right.

Still, what I can say is that the weekends have been profoundly transformative affairs: each weekend was an ordeal in its own right, and collectively they've affected me in ways that I'm still trying to grapple with; indeed, there were moments of almost transcendent clarity in Mass last Sunday and the Saturday of the previous weekend, moments which left me lost for words and that unsettle me even now. It's been a privilege and a joy to get to know the other trainees, all of whom have dazzled me with their intelligence, their integrity, their independence, and their fidelity.

That honest harmony of independence and fidelity, I think, is probably essential if we're to be able to speak with any kind of authority on these issues; it'd be utterly wrong for us to say things which we didn't believe, just as it'd be wrong for us to speak as Catholics while saying things that the Church doesn't teach. We're not drones, sent out there to push a line; on the contrary, we're trusted to do our own thing, but that trust is largely rooted in the belief that we're faithful Catholics.

The first weekend focused on just one issue, which we explored in depth as a group in order to help us understand how we can approach these things, and the second saw us looking at two topics, but dealing with them individually in studio situations. For what it's worth, I was terrible on the radio -- almost certainly the weakest of us all -- but that didn't bother me too much. I expected there to be a learning curve. If I was going to be perfect from the offing, I wouldn't need training. And, as it happens, I was far better in the television interview later that day -- it was clear that feedback from the morning and the guidance of the co-ordinators had made a real difference.

Indeed, the training was excellent, and it was fascinating to listening to a couple of the others, after just those first two weekends, taking to the airwaves at short notice to discuss the recent Benetton campaign or the recent BPAS campaign to supply the morning-after pill for free after phone interviews; learning in public can be frightening, but they accredited themselves very well.


Preparing for the Third Weekend
For the third weekend, we were all asked to prepare presentations on various topics that had hit nerves in recent weeks or months; what we said on them was wholly up to us, the idea being that we'd give presentations on issues and the others would grill us on the subjects. Topics were generally well-matched to speakers: a doctor speaking on end-of-life issues, a barrister on employment law, or a female counsellor on Catholic women in public life, say.

My topic seemed a very odd fit, as I was asked to speak about the controversy over Archbishop Nichols's comments. This was a tricky one, partly because the topic was extremely complicated, and partly because insofar as Nichols's support for civil partnerships hits a nerve it does so far more within the Church than it does without. I can only think that I was asked to handle this because, as a historian, I'm trained to winnow through things with a view to figuring out what has happened, and to do so in a diagnostic rather than in an advocatory way. The only guidance I was given was to stay close to the bit of the controversy itself, as Caroline Farrow would be dealing with civil partnerships in a broader sense.

Deep down I'm an analogue sort of fella, the kind of man who thinks a fountain pen is an elegant weapon from a more civilized age, so I printed off Nichols's original comments and his subsequent clarifications, Oddie's articles, the original CDF guidance, and the bishops' 2003 statement so I could work through them all in silent solitude, pencil in hand. I also read the 2004 Civil Partnerships Act online, and read as widely as I could to try to figure out what different lawyers thought of civil partnerships, and how the issue had been discussed in parliament at the time.


Adoption, to start with
One of the first things I was able to figure out was that Oddie's concerns about children being adopted by same-sex couples were wholly misplaced; that issue, about which the Church has expressed serious concerns, was incidental to the civil partnerships debate, having been legislated for in 2002. Although I understand and fully share his distress at the Catholic adoption agencies having been forced to shut down in the face of the new legislation, I honestly can't see why Oddie thought this relevant to the issue of civil partnerships. I'm baffled that people are still conflating these two very separate issues.

(And, for what it's worth, I don't think the Catholic adoption agencies should have shut down; I think they'd have had a very strong case had they taken matters to Strasbourg, since the European Convention on Human Rights, with which the Human Rights Act requires all UK legislation to comply, guarantees freedom of religion and conscience save when the limitation of said freedom is not merely legal, but necessary. Given how many adoption agencies were already facilitating the adoption of children by same-sex couples, it was clear that there was no need for the Catholic ones to do so too. And, of course, since they’ve closed the number of children being adopted each year has fallen further. But that's by the by.)

That left the substantive matter of the civil partnership scheme.

Nichols's statements on the subject were entirely clear, when read in the context of how he was explaining the need to defend marriage as a unique institution, but the key questions related to consistency. Were Nichols's comments consistent with what the bishops had said eight years ago, and were they consistent with the CDF?


What did Rome say?
This forced me to read the CDF's 2003 statement very carefully, such that my copy of it soon developed rather busy margins, illuminated with arrows, circles, and annotations. Entitled Considerations regarding Proposals to give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons, it's an interestingly wide-ranging document, addressed not merely to Catholic bishops, say, but to all those -- Christian or otherwise -- who are committed to promoting and defending the common good of society.

At its heart is a tension between on the one hand the need to explain and defend the basic idea of marriage, and on the other the need to give true respect to people who are homosexual. This respect, it must be stressed, isn't a matter of charity in the modern sense that can seem so patronising, but of charity in the truest sense, that being love; it is also a simple matter of justice.

The CDF distinguished between three ways in which states could deal with homosexual unions: tolerance, legal recognition, and the bestowal of legal status equivalent to marriage. It has a bit to say on how we should deal with the first situation, and regarding the other situations it says:

'In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.'

It goes on to explain why such opposition should be necessary, but says very little on what such opposition should entail, and almost as little on what exactly would constitute a 'homosexual union', save to identify homosexual unions as grounded in 'homosexual behaviour'. This, I think, can't be glossed over; the CDF doesn't give a straightforward definition, really only nearing one when it says:

'In this area, one needs first to reflect on the difference between homosexual behaviour as a private phenomenon and the same behaviour as a relationship in society, foreseen and approved by the law, to the point where it becomes one of the institutions in the legal structure. '

This point is taken up again when the CDF document says:

'It is one thing to maintain that individual citizens may freely engage in those activities that interest them and that this falls within the common civil right to freedom; it is something quite different to hold that activities which do not represent a significant or positive contribution to the development of the human person in society can receive specific and categorical legal recognition by the State.'

It was clear that central to the CDF's argument was its understanding of a 'union' as something analogous to marriage, which as an institution is intrinsically sexual and uniquely valuable; as such, it seemed to me that it was exhorting people to oppose the specific and categorical legal recognition of unions that are rooted in homosexual behaviour; it was not exhorting people to oppose legal arrangements between homosexual persons, save where those arrangements included the legal status and rights belonging to marriage.

Somewhat unhelpfully, the CDF didn't outline what it believed the legal status and rights belonging to marriage to be. I realised that this almost inevitable: such rights must differ from country to country, after all, and the CDF document was not addressed specifically to the minority Catholic Church in the UK, say, but rather to the entire world.

I spent a bit of time wrestling with this, and came to the conclusion that if certain rights belong to marriage, then whatever rights these are they must transcend individual states and legal systems. As such, it hardly threatens marriage for rights which states merely happen to have been bestowed upon marriages to be likewise bestowed upon other legal arrangements, provided that these are not the more fundamental status and rights that belong to marriage alone and that are not the property of the state.

And so, with all these thoughts buzzing in my head, I turned to the bishops' 2003 submission...



What did the Bishops say then?
In June 2003, the Department of Trade and Industry published a consultation paper entitled Civil Partnerships: a framework for the legal recognition of same-sex couples, setting out proposals for what has become the civil partnership scheme. I couldn’t help but think the DTI seemed an unlikely department to be handling the subject, for what it’s worth, given the DTI’s remit, since it gave the impression that civil partnerships were basically business arrangements, but I’m sure there was a good reason for it at the time.

The Bishops’ Conference submitted its response in September 2003, drawing on the CDF's guidelines in making their case and stressing the simultaneous need for the State to defend both the institution of marriage and the fundamental human rights of every person.

They expressed concerns that the proposed scheme would elevate homosexual relationships to a legal status virtually equivalent to civil marriage, thereby giving a signal to society that the two states are equally deserving of public protection. Their central point, in this regard, was as follows:

'Marriage would be undermined because it would no longer hold a privileged place.  The signal the law would send to rising generations is that marriage as husband and wife, and a same sex relationship, are equally valid options, and an equally valid context for the upbringing of children.   By publicly elevating same-sex relationships to a legal status virtually equivalent to civil marriage, the signal given to society would be that these two states of life are equally deserving of public protection and respect, when in fact they are not.'

The bishops further argued that the proposed scheme was largely unnecessary given recent legal developments, that it was a distraction from the real problems undermining family life in modern Britain, and that in some respects the proposed scheme was inadequate in that it created anomalies with regard to other long-term loving relationships which were not sexual in nature. In this regard the bishops cited the example of two sisters who might have shared property over many years, but they could as easily have made the same point by citing disabled people and their carers, or simply two lifelong friends.

On balance, then, they felt the proposals would not promote the common good, and strongly opposed them.

There was more to their argument than this, of course, but what was clear was that they opposed the proposed Civil Partnership scheme and did so for several reasons, some of which drew on the CDF's own guidelines. Such was their opinion in 2003, before the Civil Partnership Act was debated and codified in Parliament, and before it was granted royal approval.

The 2003 submission was, in short, their opinion of what they feared might happen; it was not their opinion of what did happen.


So, looking at the law...
The Civil Partnerships Act came into law in November 2004, and was striking in a couple of major ways. Unlike civil marriages which require publicly-made promises in a civil ceremony, civil partnerships become legal solely through the signing of a civil partnership document. This isn't something that should be brushed aside as a mere technicality. If I can pluck Chesterton's The Superstition of Divorce from the shelf, we'll see that the great man saw the idea of promises as being essential to marriage:

'I shall therefore begin by asking, in an equally mystical manner, what in the name of God and the angels a man getting married supposes he is doing. I shall begin by asking what marriage is; and the mere question will probably reveal that the act itself, good or bad, wise or foolish, is of a certain kind; that it is not an inquiry or an experiment or an accident; it may probably dawn on us that it is a promise. It can be more fully defined by saying it is a vow.'

And onward he goes to explain that the act of marriage is a vow analogous with vows of chivalry, poverty, and celibacy, just as he had twelve years earlier in Orthodoxy or seven years before that in 'A Defence of Rash Vows'. Marriages, unlike civil partnerships, entail promises; they're covenants, not contracts, and we should never forget this.

Furthermore, whatever its political objectives, the Act was not phrased in such a way that same-sex partnerships should intrinsically be understood as homosexual unions. The law never mentions sexuality or sexual acts in any respect, and does not cite anything analogous to adultery as grounds for dissolution of civil partnerships; fidelity, whether romantic or sexual, is not even implicitly identified as an assumed feature of civil partnerships. In principle, therefore, the scheme can be entered into by any two people of the same sex, other than family members or those who are already married, without any expectations that the partnership contains a sexual or romantic component.

It's worth going back to the 2003 CDF document on this. The document recognised that homosexual unions are a fact, and that civil authorities adopt three broad appoaches in deal with this fact: some authorities simply tolerate them, some advocate legal recognition of such unions, and some favour giving them legal equivalence to marriage.

As I’ve said, the bishops were originally opposed to the scheme as first proposed, and drew on the 2003 CDF document in making a case largely based on the need to defend and promote the traditional understanding of marriage. They were worried that the law of the land would be altered in such a way as to signal that that marriage and same sex relationships were equally valid options and equally valid contexts for the raising of children. In short, they were worried that the

As codified, however, the 2004 law – while not without shortcomings, particularly with reference to its exclusion of siblings from the arrangement, say – did not strike me as sending such a signal; as far as I could tell, it did not undermine the unique position of marriage in British law as it did not presuppose that civil partners are engaged in a homosexual relationship.

As I read, I understood that some have argued that it's only for technical reasons that offenses analogous to adultery aren't cited in the Civil Partnership Act as grounds for the dissolution of partnerships, but I wasn't convinced by this; the law is a technical thing, and it would hardly have been beyond the wit of Parliament to devise technical solutions to whatever difficulties might have faced them in that regard. The fact that sexuality and sexual behaviour are wholly absent from the Act is striking; it's as though Parliament went to a great deal of trouble to omit them.

Wholly silent on the issue of sexual behaviour, treating sexuality as a private phenomenon, the Civil Partnership Act did not enshrine homosexual unions as institutions within the legal structure of the United Kingdom. The Act did not give homosexual activities specific and categorical legal recognition, and it neither foresaw nor approved on homosexual behaviour. Homosexual unions exist as a fact in British life, of course, and these certainly can subsist within civil partnerships, just as they can without them, but civil partnerships should not, in themselves, be understood as homosexual unions.



But But But -
In the main I thought this worked, and I slept on it and it still made sense to me, but it left me with a few little problems to think through.

The first was that whatever about what the law says, as legislated, the nature of the English common law system meant that it would be interpreted in the field, with the courts possibly treating civil partnerships as analagous to marriage, or as being essentially homosexual unions. In ways this has already happened to a significant degree, but I don't think this is something that the bishops can ever comment on in any legitimate sense; whatever input they might have into the making of laws, they can hardly interfere in the interpretation of it.

And yes, I realise that judges will sometimes speak of parliamentary intent when interpreting laws, but that's a dangerous game, which can hardly be second-guessed; given how many hundreds of people vote to enact laws, the judges can hardly speculate on the intentions of all of them.

It was obviously true that the range of people barred from entering into civil partnerships with each other was, as far as I could tell, identical to those barred from entering into marriages with each other. This is clearly the case, and it’s something that – as far as I can tell – the bishops have always objected to. They ‘two maiden aunts’ scenario in their 2003 submission implicitly made this point, and I gather that’s still the bishops’ line now: they believe the civil partnership scheme should be expanded so that it could be entered into by a wider range of people.

I wondered too about the fact that whatever the law may say, it's very clear that lots of civil partnerships are accompanied by ceremonies and vows, and appear to take the form -- in effect -- of civil marriages for people of the same sex, such that they appear to be 'gay marriages' and are widely thought of as such. This is all true, but it is, strictly speaking, unrelated to the civil partnership registration itself; it may provide a context in which the civil partnership document is signed, but it is, ultimately, window dressing, and in any case, the bishops can hardly be expected to comment on individual partnerships. Regardless of whatever common practice may involve or common perception may be, it is important to stress that the CDF's guidance related to questions of legal recognition; the fact remains that the law does not foresee or approve homosexual behaviour, and that it does not give specific and categorical legal recognition to homosexual activities.

I really didn’t know what to make of the peculiar detail in the Civil Partnership Act that said a partnership was voidable if at the time of its formation one of the partners was pregnant by someone other than the other partner. On the face of it, this challenged my belief that the law was devoid of sexual references, but after further thought I concluded that that challenge was a feeble one, not least because it's oddly phrased: it would be impossible for one civil partner to become pregnant by the other; by definition civil partners are of the same sex!

More pertinently, in a world of contraception, IVF, and turkey basters, we surely have to acknowledge that sex and pregnancy have been divorced from each other; we cannot ever assume that a pregnant woman has become pregnant as the result of sexual intercourse. What the law seems to say is that one partner can have a partnership declared void if the other partner had been pregnant at the time the partnership had been formed, even if her pregnancy had followed an agreement between the partners and a third party, possibly not involving a sexual act, or even if it had followed a rape. It’s striking that this relates only to female civil partners; there’s nothing that says a civil partnership should be declared void if either partner should be found, at the time of the partnership, to have caused somebody else to become pregnant. Whatever this detail was meant to signify, it certainly says nothing whatsoever about sexual fidelity.

This, of course, forced me to think hard about the situations faced by those registrars who were opposed to their registering civil partnerships as they felt that by doing so they'd be approving of things which were, in effect, homosexual unions. I've talked about this in the past, actually, when trying to get my thoughts sorted on the issue of gay marriage, and my thinking is that individual registrars could probably differ on this; some might be able to live with presiding over the signing of a document that says nothing about what people do in their private lives, while others might feel that by presiding over registrations of partnerships they were facilitating things they felt they couldn't agree with. In such situations, they surely ought to be able to object to their involvement in such registration, though I think we can imagine such cases making their way -- eventually -- to Strasbourg.

Curiously, I wasn’t able to find any indication that the English or Welsh bishops had ever spoken on this topic; if they had been opposed to civil partnership as they were instituted in law, they should surely have argued that Catholic registrars would be obliged, in conscience, to refrain from registering civil partnerships. Granted, my research may have been lacking, but this seemed to be one of those ‘dog that didn’t bark’ moments. It really did look as there’s no evidence whatsoever that the bishops of England and Wales have ever opposed the civil partnership scheme as it exists in law.



So...?
Having ploughed through heaps of data on the subject, I ultimately came to the conclusion that it’s entirely consistent with Church teaching for Archbishop Nichols to say he supports the civil partnership scheme as an existing and legitimate mechanism to help give stability to committed couples of the same sex, given that the law refrains from granting homosexual unions any sort of parliamentary imprimatur and thereby does not undermine the unique position of marriage in UK law.

It would, of course, be a different matter if marriage itself were to be redefined; definitions are about limitations, after all, and things gain meaning from what they're not as much as from what they are. Nichols's main aim, as he's made clear on many occasions, is to defend marriage as it has always existed in British law.


The Weekend and the Blog
I pulled together my thoughts on the subject into a presentation of 1,400 words or so, and gave my presentation on Saturday afternoon; it went down rather better than I thought it would, given that I was arguing something rather counter-intuitive, which I hadn't believed myself only a few days earlier.  

There were precious few questions, though what there were homed in on the conflict between how the law existed in theory and worked out in practice. Afterwards a few of the others complimented me on the paper, saying there'd been so few questions because I'd explained the controversy so clearly, and later on -- indeed, it may well have been the next day -- I was asked whether I'd be willing to turn it into a post for the Catholic Voices blog.

I came home on Monday, and on Tuesday I finished streamlining my talk, losing a few hundred words so that it wouldn't be absurdly long and so that people could read it in one easy go to get a clear handle on the issue. Following a tiny bit of editorial tweaking, it was posted on the Catholic Voices site shortly afterwards.

There was nothing frantic about this. There was no rush to defend the bishops, whatever others might imagine. It just happened; I was asked to explore and explain an issue, and in the process of doing so, reached conclusions I hadn't expected to reach. Others agreed, and we thought it'd be helpful if we could shed some light on the issue.

I fully understand that others might disagree with the conclusions I've reached, and that my colleagues have come to share. That’s fine: this is a complicated issue, and I think we have to recognise that others might legitimately disagree with us. I've no plans to shout down those who disagree with me. Following Chesterton, I may be certain that I am right, but I’m not so bigoted that I’m unable to imagine how I might possibly be wrong.