The world just became a little bit weirder.

Who would have thought you could find a situation where the American politicians, the Administration said to the Pope,

“Would you please be a bit more theological and do doctrine for us?”

And the Pope challenges the American administration to get their political policy right.

It’s a kind of swapping of roles or exchanging of hands. How do we ever get to that? And what does it mean when JD Vance says in particular, to the pope,

“Would you please be more Augustininian”

to an Augustinian pope? Well, let’s go back and have a look at what’s really going on.

A War of Words—and an Awkward Clarification

So, first of all, we have had the war of words between the pope and the president of the United States, which fortunately has died down.

Pope Leo on the way back from Algeria said with some humility and bridge building, that his speech about ‘tyrants’ didn’t refer to Donald Trump.

Well, it might stretch credulity just a little bit, but we’re being asked to believe the pope and so of course, we have to believe him. He explained they wrote it two weeks ago before the spat with the president took place, and they didn’t have the president in mind.

On the other hand, what kind of system is it where the pope’s speech writers or his chaplain, or his administrative assistants, don’t say to him, “you know, that speech that you wrote two weeks ago doesn’t fit very well with the present circumstances- now that you’ve had a public row with the President. Maybe we should change it?

Perhaps, just perhaps, we should take out the word ‘tyrants’ or say ‘tyrants of non-democratic countries’ ? But they didn’t. So, I suspect the Pope’s telling the truth when he said they didn’t envision the word ‘tyrants’ applying to Donald Trump when the text was constructed; but you just wonder whether or not there was a sense that they left it in just in case it might add a bit of traction to the argument.

Well, who knows?

Vance’s Challenge: Be More Theological

However, JD Vance has asked the pope to be more theologically precise when he pronounces:

“God doesn’t bless violence or war”.

And the pope appears to be infusing in his own comments a concern with the way in which politics is being practised.

Is the pope reacting as a democratic politician from Chicago might? Or is he completely free from that?

You might be entitled to wonder because one of the first things he said in an informal interview, when he made his first foray into politics, was he was worried about immigration. He was concerned about the way in which the immigration policies of the United States might be unfair to immigrants.

Whereas of course there were lots of people in the United States who thought that the way in which immigration had been practiced might be unfair to the American population - in terms of crime gangs and the diminution of cultural cohesion.

There’s no doubt at all that the pope’s entitled to offer a critique about the ethics of political decisions.

He can certainly disguise his involvement a little by claiming, as he did, he’s really preoccupied by peace.

Is it true, however, as JD Vance suggests, that the pope hasn’t given sufficient articulated attention in these circumstances to St. Augustine and his renowned ‘Just -War theory, as it emerges and is refined in the hands of St. Thomas Aquinas.

This is a moment of paradox. Many people felt it was a little cheeky that a recent convert like JD Vance should ask the Pope to reconsider his familiarity with St. Augustine.

Was it?

If the Pope had made it clear his comments on the situation in the Middle East were in fact profoundly informed by St. Augustine and by St Thomas Aquinas, perhaps JD Vance wouldn’t have needed to say it.

But there we are. We had some ambiguity. Not quite as ambiguous as Pope Francis, but more than the situation really needed.

Iran, Nuclear Enrichment, and Self-Defence

Strangely, like so many things in life, this seems to come back so often to the Jews in general, and to the Iranian hatred of Israel in particular.

What is the context to the Iranian conflict with America?

It is that America launched a war of infrastructural attrition on Iran because the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported that Iran had enriched their uranium from 3%, which is where it belongs as a level appropriate for nuclear power stations, to a stratospheric 60%.

And in reality, you only enrich to 60% if you’re going to make a nuclear bomb.

In public discussion about this, I've been surprised at how many people have admonished me by saying “How dare you make that assumption? Who do you think you are to assume that?”

Except that if you’re going to enrich uranium more than 3% and up to 60%, it really can only be for one purpose, particularly if you’ve got the reputation for terrorist activity and sponsoring international violence as part of your foreign policy as Iran has, more than any other country in the world perhaps.

But you don’t hear these enrichment figures talked about much in the public space. So perhaps the public doesn’t know what they signify?

The wider geopolitical context is that for 40 years Iran has been sponsoring terrorist groups, a large number of whom were suicide bombers.

The reason the suicide aspect is important is because it moves us away from mutually assured destruction as a form of restraint.

If you combine a willingness to commit suicide with the determination to make nuclear weapons, and add a conviction that you have a god-given duty to wipe out the whole of the state of Israel, including a further consideration that your particular brand of Shiism has an apocalyptic agenda, which an apocalyptic crisis to enable thr advent of the 12th (expected but hidden) Imam.

Turn this all nuclear, and the reason for concern is heightened. It was that alarming conjunction that the American made the American administration decide it was sufficiently grave to require military intervention on the basis of self-defense.

Just War: St. Augustine’s Framework

By now, most people have heard the criteria for a just war theory so many times they know them backwards. But proportionate response and self-defense are two of the prime ingredients. And on that basis of the fact so far, they appear to be met. So at least it seemed to me, but less so to many of the American left-wing cardinals who, for reasons I don’t fully understand. Perhaps because they think that 60% is not a level of enrichment that automatically leads to nuclear weapons?

But we should remember St. Augustine’s key judgments.

The pope is an Augustinian. He’ll be very familiar with them and one is that war is always tragic. Even justified war is a consequence of sin. We never celebrate it. The aim must be peace. The intention is to restore peace and order. Right intention matters. No hatred, no cruelty, no revenge or domination. Legitimate authority is needed. Private individuals can’t wage war. Only rulers can. But to what extent does Trump need Congress to make the actions legitimate? Some of the cardinals thought he hadn’t obtained proper authority.

Does God Bless Violence?

To those of us observing their pontifications, it seemed odd indeed to hear American left-wing cardinal say categorically and theologically that the criteria for self-defense were not met; and to this, at the same time, to hear the pope say categorically that “God doesn’t bless violence.”

It seemed to me as a nonpartisan observer that self-defence requirement had been met. So many of us found it difficult when the Pope stood up and proclaimed on a world stage to the Americans, just as they’re engaging in a war of self-defence, that “God doesn’t bless violence.”

It sounded like a rebuke. If it’s not a rebuke and it’s only a poorly timed theological truism, well, how accurate a theological truism was it?

That may have been why JD Vance asked the pope to be more forensic about his theological analysis.

Scripture, Tradition, and History

Dan Hitchins wrote a very helpful piece covering this aspect of papal analysis. He took us back to to the Bible and then forward to church tradition.

First of all, he referred to the book of Joshua where the children of Israel are told to fight for the freedom of the promised land. They are injuncted to take a fairly severe and violent attitude toward the tribes around them. They had invaded a place where other people lived. The other people weren’t going to like it very much. If the Jews were going to live there peacefully and safely, they needed to defeat their enemies.

Did God bless their violence? Well, yes, it looks like he did because it was part of his divine purpose. How often can you say that? Not very often, but on this occasion the book of Joshua claims it. The Pope didn’t bother to make that particular distinction, but there it is in the Bible.

What about Jesus?

If our Lord and Saviour had taken the strict pacifist view that Leo implied in his remarks, then it’s very hard to understand his relationship with the centurion whom he so much admired in the Gospels. He was a professionally violent man - a fighter, maybe even a Roman mercenary. No rebuke for him?

What about John the Baptist? He was a purist in all matters, theological and moral. The furthest he went was telling Roman soldiers not to abuse their power. “Don’t extort money. Don’t accuse people falsely. Be content with your wages.” It doesn’t sound like a unilateral declaration of pacifism in the way that the pope declared suggested. We don’t see the papal concern in that language or format in the gospels.

What about Catholic history?

As it happens, I’ve been rereading the life of King Alfred the Great. I’ve been struck by two things that went hand in hand. The first was that his determination was that his people should be as Christians literate, and in particular, relearn Latin.

He lamented that Latin wasn’t read and spoken enough in Saxon England and people should, like him, make a priority of saying their prayers.

But secondly, he was determined to be an efficient and proficient military leader as he faced pagan invaders. Did God bless Alfred’s violence?

We would say that he did. We would say that the civilization that Alfred wanted to create and to defend as a Christian civilisation of some richness was indeed something that he could depend upon God’s help and protection for, and that God did give him that help, protection and blessing.

You may know a little about Louis IX of France. His dates are 1214 to 12770. He was one of the most admired Christian rulers in history. He was canonized by Pope Leo’s predecessors for his personal holiness and for his attempts to govern as a Christian king in both justice and charity. But during his life, he went on two crusades, the seventh and the eighth.

He attended mass daily, practiced fasting, cared personally for the poor and the sick, reformed the legal system, fed the poor, and went on crusade to fight.

And up until now, the church has always said he was blessed by God. In the end, just in case you wondered, he was captured in Egypt during the Crusades and he died in Tunisia. But he was defending Christendom. There’s not a whisper theologically that what he did was not blessed or favoured by God as a Christian ruler facing, in particular, Islamic insurgents.

As an Englishman, I ought to be suspicious of Joan of Arc, but on the contrary, she’s one of my heroes, one of my favourite saints. I’m entirely convinced the words she heard from God, and the miracles that took place in her life, were authentic, even though they were aimed at ridding France of the English. And I celebrate the battle of Lepanto, and the invocation of our lady and the power of the rosary, where Islamic forces were resisted by violence by Christendom; and the siege of Vienna with a wonderful Polish horsemen. A moment of providential deliverance as Islam banged at the gates of Europe to get in and was resisted. And this too was blessed by God; or so the church has always said up until now. But since Pope Leo appeared to be saying something different, you can see why JD Vance asked him to be a bit more focused about what he meant by the phrase that “God never blesses violence”- given the witness of the Bible and the history of the Catholic Church in the West; he might the pope have added unless it’s for self-defence….but he didn’t.

Ordo Amoris: The Deeper Dispute

If we are to assume that JD Vance asked the pope to be a bit more explicit because, having made his comment just at the point that he did, it looked like it might constitute a political comment, rather than a theological one.

JD Vance pays the pope the compliment of a politician taking the trouble to look to the teaching of St. Augustine as he exercises ethical scrutiny over the political ethics, and the policy decisions of the American administration.

Famously, though, but but rather sadly, the Pope and JD Vance fell out over St. Augustine’s teaching on Ordo Amoris.

You may remember what this was about.

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The Pope’s actual job

The Pope’s actual job — the irreplaceable, specific, urgent job for which he was selected — is to proclaim the uniqueness of Christ and to guard the faith.

The incarnation, the resurrection, the insistence that God entered history at a fixed point in human form.

This singularity is the hinge on which all human existence turns.

Either it is the most consequential fact in the history of the world, or it is nothing.

The Holy Father has spoken again about Islam from the papal plane, expressing a sincere hope that Christians and Muslims can live together in friendship and peace.

We should all share that hope.

However, hope is not the same thing as truth.

When the Pope presents Lebanon as a shining example of Christian-Muslim harmony, and suggests that the two faiths can easily become friends, he is speaking from an idealism that simply does not match reality — neither the reality on the ground in Lebanon, nor the clear teaching of the Quran itself.

The Quran is not ambiguous on this subject.

if you want to know why faithful Muslims will not respond to the papal under-informed optimism we need to turn to their authoritative text.

In Surah 5:51 it states:

“O you who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians as protectors. They are protectors of one another. And whoever among you takes them as protectors, then surely he is one of them.”

So far from entertaining friendship, Islam requires a different course fo action:

Even more explicit is Surah 9:29:

“Fight those who do not believe in Allah nor in the Last Day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the jizya willingly while they are humbled.”

The respect is not mutual.

And Surah 98:6 adds:

“Indeed, those who disbelieve from the People of the Book and the polytheists will be in the fire of Hell, abiding eternally therein. Those are the worst of creatures.”

These are not obscure or marginal verses. They are foundational to Islamic theology.

Lebanon was once a Christian-majority country. Christians have gone from roughly 50–60% of the population in the mid-20th century to around 30% today.

Villages have been destroyed. Communities that have lived there for centuries are shrinking and, in some places, disappearing.

This is not ancient history. It is recent, documented, and ongoing.

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Trust is the glue that holds society together.

We live in a society where trust has become unglued and evaporated, from the King breaking his trust with Christianity and putting his weight behind a failed multiculturalism, to the powerful sense that governments are against their own people.

Throughout Western Europe, a fissure has appeared between a form of government that wants to drive the people in a direction they don’t want to go. In this mix have appeared a degree of ecological eco-fascism and a growing proportion of Islamic authoritarianism from the right.

There is an argument about whether one can, in rhetorical speech, refer to both eco-fascists and Islamo-fascists, but the point of the argument is that both ideologies are prepared to use a degree of authoritarian weight to control those who dissent.

It is the issue of dissent that is threatening to change the society we live in and derail the norms of free speech, social intercourse and political argument.

Professor David Betz, Professor of War Studies at the University of London, has warned us that we’re approaching a new kind of civil war and suggested there are six places along a scale of development. The cause for anxiety is that if David Betz is right, in Ireland, a boiling point where anger has spilt over into direct conflict between the military, the police, and the citizens — they appear to have reached stage five.

The civil unrest is going to take place between the government and its people rather than between ecologists or Islamists and the indigenous people, because the government has put its weight behind both ideologies.

In Ireland today, there is the possibility of a safety valve operating, with a vote of no confidence in the present government and the present coalition. But whether or not that safety valve is exercised, the underlying tensions within our society remain the same and will continue to intensify until a boiling point is reached and some breakdown occurs.

Rather like the Southport stabbings, nobody can foresee whose death is going to cause the overflowing of anger, violence, and furious dissent until we find the civil war is upon us.

England is a little behind Ireland, but nonetheless, truckers and a coalition of dissent against the authoritarian overreach of the government are meeting together to consider the same kind of social protest.

William Taylor, Farmers for Action coordinator has threatened protests in Britain too. “There is huge concern that current policies are failing to address the pressures facing key sections of the UK economy. This is the organisation that was instrumental in organising protests against the government's family tax farm.

Howard Cox, the founder of the Campaign group for fuel UK I said "I'm in discussion with farmers and others to help fuel protests in London and other places as drivers and businesses in sick to death of being used as Labour’s cash cows.”

The political Right still don’t get that what we are facing is a spiritual, moral and metaphysical crisis. They see it as a failure of political pragmatism. They get the cause wrong, but can still sense the coming civil conflict.

Tom Tugendhat commented today in the national press:

“if we are to avoid the deepening public anger and political instability, governments must shift from offering snake oil and finding solutions. The state must become resilient. Policymakers must be honest but the limits of state power and return agency the citizens, so that the government can focus on what it can do well…..

The tides of dissatisfaction rising around Europe are not a series of isolated incidents. It is a revolt against an institutional order that promises much and delivers little. The public’s anger is a demand for candour and competence. We must reform the state to be more effective, and even more focused on core duties for- security, stability, and help for the truly needy. The choice is not between reform and stability, form and ruin.”

No- it’s not about efficiency and reform. It’s about what is left of the civilisation that Christianity built and the dire, asphyxiating collectivist rival contenders.

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When the Pope and the President duel in public, is it prophecy versus power, or prayer mistaken for public policy?

When Pete Hegseth invoked the wrath of God against the Iranians, it caused alarm to many people who were politically left of his own brand of evangelical Republicanism.

One of the people triggered by it now seems to have been the Pope.

On Palm Sunday, he offered a homily which rebuked politicians who had blood on their hands.

Commentators, who included me, would immediately ask whether or not the Pope was getting involved in the foreign policy issues that governed the Iranian war.

I, at one point, thought that there might just be a little bit of wiggle room—that he was annunciating principles of geopolitical Catholic ethics rather than rebuking the American administration.

It looks as though I was wrong.

Suddenly, today, a spat of words has broken out between President Trump and Pope Leo, and apart from intensifying antagonism and misunderstanding, it is not easy to see what good will come out of it.

President Trump has his own style of communication. It is full of provocative aggression, hyperbole, and full-on confrontation. It is how he has done deals the whole of his life. He creates outrage and apoplexy in his opponents. This very often has the effect of wrong-footing them. It has worked very well for him.

We have even coined the response to those who take him too seriously, which we call Trump Derangement Syndrome.

One of the questions we have to ask ourselves is whether or not the Pope has a moral and public duty to comment on President Trump’s tasteless, aggressive, but often effective hyperbole.

Whether or not we think he has such a moral duty, the Pope did comment, and perhaps almost inevitably this produced a furious response from President Trump.

Pope Leo’s response on his plane flight to Argentina was this:

“I have no fear of either the Trump administration or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel. And that’s what I believe I am called to do, and what the Church is called to do. We are not politicians. We are not likely to make foreign policy with the same perspective as he might understand it. But I do believe the message of the Gospel—blessed are the peacemakers—is a message the world needs to hear today.”

How can one criticise the Pope? Everything he said is true.

The difficulty is that even if he did not think he was speaking in a way intended to correct American foreign policy, the President and his advisers heard it in that way—as if they were being rebuked.

One of the questions that arises from this exchange is why the Pope is directing his ethical remarks at the American administration rather than the Iranian administration.

Why is it that the Iranian administration and its actions do not find a place in his public teaching or moral concern?

A good deal, of course, depends on one’s presuppositions. It may be that being triggered by Pete Hegseth’s aggressive religiosity affects one’s presuppositions.

But on the other side of the argument, there are those who believe that Trump may have saved the world from a nuclear winter.

There was a school of intelligence that said that the Iranians were only weeks away from being able to produce a nuclear bomb.

Whilst Mutually Assured Destruction has saved the world since the atomic bomb was invented, there was always going to be an exception to that safety—and that was if you could no longer count on the sanity and instinct for self-preservation on both sides.

To those who understand the theological priorities of the Iranian ruling regime, this is one group for whom mutually assured destruction holds no terror and exercises no restraint.

The particular brand of Islam they follow teaches that they have a duty to bring on apocalyptic disaster in order to fulfil their eschatological expectations.

If you think that the Iranians were close to having a nuclear bomb, and if you take seriously their determination to destroy Israel and wipe it out “from the river to the sea,” and if you believe that this is consistent with a lack of restraint in terms of the nuclear exchange this might provoke, then you would reach the conclusion that the work of President Trump has been to save the world from nuclear disaster.

This is not a view that can be proved

, but it is certainly a position that ought to be entertained.

When the Pope proclaimed “blessed are the peacemakers,” is it possible that saving the world from nuclear holocaust might constitute an act of peacemaking?

Some historical curiosity may help.

His predecessor was faced with an invasion of the Huns and their deadly and highly successful advance, sweeping in from the East and threatening Western civilisation with disaster.

The invasions of Attila with his force of Huns were terrifyingly successful. Beyond the impact of a huge body count, they created psychological terror, the collapse of cities, mass displacement, and civilisational shock.

Pope Leo I saw it as his duty to travel to meet Attila in person—which he did in 452 AD near the River Mincio in Italy.

After the confrontation between the two men, Attila withdrew.

Some people claimed it was a miracle. Others said it was in response to disease, threats to his rear, and his need to find a face-saving reason for withdrawing. But nonetheless, instead of entering into a war of words, the Pope became a negotiator with the chief cause of the threat to civilisation.

Might Pope Leo XIV take some inspiration from Leo I.

Instead of confronting the loud, highly hyperbolic, destabilising President Trump, he might have arranged a meeting with the Iranian leaders.

If he was going to use his considerable moral authority to improve the conditions for peacemaking, it may be that the people he ought to have been talking to were the Iranians rather than the American administration.

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A new apostolate, a renewed mission, and a moment of real hope

I’m very glad to say I have a small announcement I can make. I’ve been waiting for some time to make it, with some anticipation.

A while ago, a friend of mine, Justin Kuran, who is a criminal lawyer in New York and a very successful novelist, had a vision. He wanted to draw together a number of people to act as part of a group to reclaim Christendom for the Catholic faith.

He had the idea of getting a team of people who could articulate what the faith was about and what the issues really were.

The difficulty is that one of the key members of that team found himself caught up in difficulties not of his own making — entirely unjust, untrue and unfair — but which meant that we had to postpone announcing what the scope of the team was going to be.

Our third member is Father Carlos Martins. He’s one of the most well-known and respected exorcists in the Catholic Church, and of course the author of The Exorcist Files.

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The Resurrection: Stunning, Unexpected and almost Unsatisfactory.

If you were the author or the editor of chapters in the Gospels describing the resurrection, you would almost certainly not have written up the appearances of Jesus in the way that we have them.

They are both stunning, surprising and almost in their unexpectedness, unsatisfactory.

They are stunning because a large number of people encountered the risen Christ in a way that puts the historicity of the event beyond question to any reasonable-minded observer.

They are stunning because they had the effect of turning round the lives of terrified, demoralised and confused disciples and followers to the extent that they overcame the very empire that presided over the execution of Jesus.

Rome fell to the Christians after just 275 years.

They are astonishing because the encounters with the resurrected Christ set off a series of explosions of spiritual renewal that overwhelmed paganism, overwhelmed human sacrifice, overwhelmed cultures of revenge, and set out to create a civilisation with an ethic that drove to put compassion at the top of its hierarchy of ethics.

Explosive encounter with Christ turned human beings from disposable chattels to being endowed with a sacred integrity and created the very best aspects of Western culture.

They are unexpected, because the recognition which we might have expected to be obvious is sometimes slightly delayed.

But Something is Unsatisfactory

But there’s something unsatisfactory about them too.

Like me, you might wish that the encounters were much more straightforward and obvious.

How could it be that Mary Magdalene in the garden, even with eyes full of tears, even in the early light of the morning, simply totally mistook the resurrected Jesus for the gardener?

How could it be that the disciples on the road to Emmaus could walk along next to him, looking at him, listening to him, discussing with him, and not recognise him?

It’s not that this suggests any doubt — it’s simply not what any of us would expect if we were writing a story.

Saint Luke in chapter 24:16 explains it with words that cause as much trouble as help:

“their eyes were prevented from recognising him”

St John does no better with Mary:

“she did not know that it was Jesus” (John 20:14)

until he calls her name.

The Sixth Sense of the Spirit

In fact, this unusual and strange pattern of encounter appears to have a purpose, at least according to the early Fathers and some of the most insightful medieval mystics.

It is presented to us as evidence of the shift from a purely empirical judgement based on our five senses, to an ignition of the spiritual senses which take us into the world of the Holy Spirit.

The patristic and mystical writings use a number of different images and patterns, but for the moment, I would like to suggest that we simply call this dimension of the spirit the sixth sense.

It is a fairly commonplace for people to recognise something often called intuition and to add it to the five physical senses that all human beings have.

The fact that other people have had the idea first doesn’t stop us from borrowing it and improving it or relocating it somewhere better.

Gregory the Great and later on Saint Bonaventure all developed a language of spiritual senses which describes the way in which the soul can see, hear, taste, smell and touch in the same way as the body does as part of the mystery of faith.

Luke in 24:32 introduces the idea of this additional sense when he describes recognition dawning through the burning of the heart.

Recognition in the Breaking of the Bread

I’ve always been slightly confused about the way in which the disciples recognise Jesus in the breaking of the bread.

But this was partly because I had succumbed to a Protestant reading of the breaking of the bread as representing something Jesus did at the Last Supper.

But Cleopas and his companion were not at the Last Supper, so there is no reason why they should have recognised him as an aspect of their memory.

As a Catholic, the whole thing becomes instantly clear.

For Jesus is going to make himself accessible in the Mass more than in any other way in the Church of the Resurrection.

And so, as he acts as Eucharistic president, demonstrating the shape of the liturgy that will define and configure the Church, they are the first disciples to find themselves at the embryonic Mass and recognise Jesus in the actions.

From the Senses to the Soul

This process of confusion and surprise, which represents a transition from the life of the body to the perception of the soul, is a journey that each one of us has to take.

The moment we embark on the Eucharistic life and engage in life in the Spirit, we find ourselves developing that sixth sense — that understanding of the language of life in the Spirit.

And it is precisely this awareness of faith, rooted in a whole different dimension other than the sensory one, that marks our life as Christians.

Saint Bonaventure was one of the voices in the Church that explained this dimension with particular clarity.

He talked about the heart functioning as the integrative centre of spiritual intelligence and desire that allows the divine presence to be intuitively experienced.

In his work Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, he describes the soul’s journey towards union with God as involving the recovery and elevation of these spiritual senses.

He sees the combination of our willingness to respond to God just at the point where God meets us with grace, initiating a recovery and elevation of these spiritual senses, culminating in what becomes a deepening ecstatic love in the Spirit.

Our intellect and affect (will and desire) cooperate more deeply.

He thinks our sight and hearing belong more to the life of the intellect, whilst smell, taste and touch belong more to the area of feeling or affective delighted union.

Grace Perfects Nature

St Thomas Aquinas follows the same road of exploration.

He integrates similar ideas, emphasising that grace perfects nature.

In other words, there is a fuel of the Spirit which amplifies our natural gifts.

This allows the intellect and the will, enlightened by faith and charity, to encounter, perceive and love Christ in a way that is so much more than simply the sight of him with our eyes.

Our Own Emmaus Journey

So when we see the stumbling of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and the tear-filled Mary on her knees in the resurrection garden, they represent for us the early stages of our own transition into the life of the resurrection.

This is the dimension of life in the Spirit where a more supernatural and Spirit-charged encounter with Jesus takes place.

This is where we cultivate the intuition of the heart, a great sensitivity formed by reading Scripture, consuming Jesus in the Mass, and the breath of the heart in prayer.

Through this pattern of life, the veiled presence of the risen Christ becomes more inwardly evident and accessible to us.

From Blindness to Burning Hearts

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Christ is Risen — A Constitutional Crisis

Easter 2026 and the clash of two revelations

“Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Allelujah.”

I once had a line manager who was the Vice Chancellor of the university I taught at; and as it happened, he was, by intellectual trade, an economist. When he came across a problem that he didn’t want to deal with, or he thought was nonsensical, he would dismiss it and say,

“No matter,- it’s just ‘theological’.”

Since I am not convinced that economists really know what they are talking about, and since economic reality and the theory they claim to practice are often at odds, I suspect they are poor predictors of reality. They don’t even seem to be able to agree with each other, so I wasn’t greatly offended.

“Theological” became his way of saying it didn’t matter. It was of such light theoretical importance he didn’t need to pay attention to it.

In fact, ‘theological’ describes the nature of God, and of all the reality that flows from who God is. So it matters greatly.

We have come to a moment of what appears to be a theological and therefore, it is no surprise that it is also a civilizational, and even constitutional, crisis.

It’s theological.

A Crisis No One Expected

Who would have guessed that Easter 2026 would bring us to—if not a constitutional crisis—then at least a moment of serious constitutional and cultural tension?

Nor would it be obvious that lying behind this tension is a verse from the Quran that has brought matters to a head.

However, if you ask people what Surah 4:157 says, most of them—if they’re not Islamic (and often even if they are ) will not have the faintest idea.

But this is what the surah says: describing Jesus ‘ crucifixion, …

“They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it was made to appear so to them.”

This is the foundational text in the Quran that denies the crucifixion, and so therefore, the resurrection, of Jesus.

Essentially, it follows that if you accept this, that the Gospels are not telling the truth about the death and resurrection of Jesus. In that scenario, he never rose from the dead because he never died. He never died because the Romans failed to execute him—either in a moment of uncharacteristic incompetence, or because, by some cosmic sleight of hand, somebody was crucified in his place. (Later Islamic theology takes a number of different views.)

But whoever it was, it wasn’t Jesus.

He didn’t die.
He didn’t rise again.

He is not God. We are not saved.

The Problem This Creates

The difficulty with this is that Jesus is therefore, by implication, proved to be a false prophet, at best, or a liar at worst.

Because Jesus foretold that he would be crucified and rise from the dead. Prophets have to tell the truth. That’s how you know that they are authentic prophets. So who was telling the truth? Jesus or Muhammed?

The Quran says Jesus was wrong.

When we say the Quran, of course, what we mean is Muhammad. And when we say Muhammad, what we mean is the angel Gabriel—or, to be clear, a spirit ‘Jibril’ who presented himself to Muhammad as the angel Gabriel.

So to be clear.

Muhammad was visited by an angel who identified himself as ‘Jibril’, Gabriel. He told Muhammad Jesus didn’t die on the cross, and that Christianity was, in effect, based upon, well, you might politely say a misunderstanding, but really a ‘deception’.

Muhammad received and proclaimed this revelation about 570 years after the resurrection, and about 770 miles away from Jerusalem, in Mecca. You might ask what did he know and how did he know it? And the answer is that it all came from this visiting spirit.

As a result, he was entirely dependent, for this revelation, upon the ‘angel’ that appeared to him.

It ought to come as no surprise that from time to time, Muhammed himself entertained doubts as to whether or not he could wholly depend on the authenticity of the angel. The history of the last one and a half thousand years has been shaped by this act of discernment, The stakes are high. Estimating total deaths caused by Islamic expansion and conflicts over 1,400 years is historically impossible, as there is insufficient reliable data. But, as an example, modern data suggests over 249,000 deaths from Islamist terrorist attacks between 1979 and 2024.

The historical death toll estimates for pre-modern conflicts range from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions.

The stakes are high in discerning the metaphysical origins of ‘the Religion of Peace.’

The King and the Question of Easter

Let’s now go to King Charles and the question of Easter.

Why did the King decline to give an Easter greeting to his people?

It is perfectly true that there is no established tradition of an Easter message from the monarch. Everyone knows the late Queen gave a Christian message, and the King gives a Christmas message. But, as yet, there is no precedent for an Easter one,

However, things evolve. We have also seen how the King uses his Christian message to reach out across all faiths. In other words, the Christmas message is not exclusive to Christians, he has diluted it, one might say, so that he uses it to include a great range of religions.

But when he reaches out to Islam, that he makes, exclusive - particular to Islam.

In other words, this “defender of faiths” treats all faiths as part of a kind of global spirituality—unless they are Muslims, in which case he offers something exclusive and specific.

He did this in 2025 when he wished Muslims in his kingdom Eid Mubarak, a happy end to Ramadan.

And he did it again in 2026, offering greetings at the beginning of Ramadan.

It is precisely these greetings to the Islamic community that raised expectations.

If the King is going to exercise a ministry of encouragement to different religious groups, then surely, as defender of the faiths, thought many Christians, he must treat them with even-handedness.

They were mistaken.

But it was this expectation of even-handedness, which the King himself sowed, that made Christians feel they might receive from him some form of Lenten—or more appropriately, Easter—greeting.

It didn’t happen.

Protocol or Choice?

Was this protocol—or choice?

It is easy to take refuge behind historic protocol and say, “Well, this has never been done before.”

But Charles has already altered protocol by providing greetings specifically to Muslims.

He could just as easily have reached out to Christians—especially given that Easter is the most important moment in the Christian year.

We can debate whether Easter is more important than Christmas. Both reveal something about who God is and how he acts.

But Easter offers something more.

It offers proof.

We cannot prove that Jesus was the eternal Logos, born of a virgin.

But Easter offers us the opportunity to test Jesus’s claims. Beyond the astonishing words, the unique teaching, the exorcisms, the healings, the raising of others from the dead, his own death was the supreme test. We have ‘proof’ that Jesus was who he said he was, because he overcame death and rose from the dead. And any other explanation falls short as being less convincing or more unsatisfactory to the enquiring open mind.

The Clash of Revelations

But here is the difficulty.

If you affirm that Jesus rose from the dead, you thereby repudiate Muhammad, Surah 4:157, and the ‘Jibril’, the spirit that spoke to him and dictated the Koran.

We are dealing here with nothing less than a direct clash of opposing revelations.

If Muhammad is a prophet, then either he was mistaken, misled, or, more bluntly, a false prophet.

The New Testament does not hesitate to speak clearly about such matters. The first letter of St John tells us:

“Test the spirits.”
Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.

Christians are entitled to ask questions about the spirit that came to Muhammad and dictated the Quran.

That spirit did not confess that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh.

And so, from a Christian point of view, it did not come from God.

St Paul puts it even more strongly in Galatians:

“Even if an angel from heaven should preach a different gospel, let him be accursed.”

You cannot believe in both Muhammad and Jesus.

One of them is wrong.

We all have to choose.

A Theological Choice at the Heart of the State

In an unexpected way, Easter 2026 presented King Charles with a choice, a theological choice.

There are two revelations, and they are not compatible.

One says: Christ is risen.

If we say, “Christ is risen, he is risen indeed”, we reject the authority of the Quran.

If we affirm the Quran, we deny the resurrection.

There is no neutral ground. No compromise. No syncretism.

The Appearance of Preference

Some have quietly asked whether the King has privately converted to Islam. We cannot know that.

But we can say this:

By publicly affirming Islamic festivals while declining to affirm Easter, the King has created the impression of preference.

And so we come to what may be the. heart of the matter. Is this the explanation?

It is even possible he avoided saying “Christ is risen”

because he did not want to offend Islam.

But that raises the question:

Has he not, in effect, preferred Islam by refusing the Christian Easter greeting?

Because you cannot have both.

Two Visions of God

This is not just abstract theology.

It produces two entirely different civilisations.

Two different anthropologies. Two different moral visions.

At the deepest level, it is about the nature of God.

Allah—Muhammad’s God—is not the same as the God who revealed himself to Moses.

St John of Damascus was an outstanding theologian. He grew up under Islamic rule. He served as a financier in Damascus, before resigning and leaving for a Christian monastery near Jerusalem. He was writing in the 8th century under Islamic rule and recognised the opposing claims of each revelation = clearly. He treated Islam as a Christian heresy, a complete mangling and misunderstanding of the Gospel narrative.

At the heart of the difference he suggested lies this:

Islam believes God is ultimate power, and cannot suffer. cannot accept a God who
Christianity believes God is ultimate Love and insists that God redeems through suffering.

We are dealing with two fundamental realities:

Power and love - set against each other,

Power or Love

Gregory the Great, rather beautifully writes that God did not defeat evil by overwhelming it with force—but by something more subtle and more powerful.

Love enters into suffering and transforms it from within.

This is not weakness.

It is a higher form of power.

Thomas Aquinas develops this further.

Islam emphasises divine power—authority, and, where necessary, force.

Christianity spreads through witness, suffering, martyrdom, and love.

We must decide:

Are we more fully human, and closer to God, when we live by love, or by power?

Civilizational Consequences

This is not abstract.

It shapes societies.

Christianity permits force only in defence.

Islam, historically, condones expansion through force.

These differences produce entirely different cultures.

Entirely different expectations.

Entirely different visions of human life.

The Moment We Face

What we are witnessing is a civilizational and constitutional crossroads.

This is not primarily about immigration—though it touches it.

Not primarily about culture—though it includes it.

It is about something deeper:

• Truth

• Authority

• The nature of God

• The structure of reality

It is a choice between:

• Power and love

• Coercion and redemption

• Command and gift

The King’s Responsibility

It is a sadness that King Charles appears insufficiently theologically informed to recognise what is at stake.

In attempting to practice multicultural hospitality, he has stepped into a theological contradiction.

He has affirmed one revelation while failing to affirm another.

And in doing so, he has created confusion about the very identity of the monarchy.

What Must Now Be Asked

Some are calling for abdication.

That may sound extreme, but the underlying concern is the question of whether he is fit to be a Christian monarch. Many now believe he is not.

Godfrey Bloom has called on Charles to abdicate, for he thinks he is not fit to be king- and here he explains why:

If the monarch no longer clearly represents the faith that gave rise to the monarchy, something of great profundity and significance for us all has been weakened.

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Holy Saturday reminds me, in part, of that place in the imagination of C. S. Lewis described in his book, ‘The Magician’s Nephew, where there is a ‘wood between the worlds’; a quiet, still place from which, with the right ring, you can move out of one world, pause, and then move into another.

In the Office of Readings for Saturday, an ancient homily is given to help us in our prayers and reflections on the mystery of Christ’s death and impending resurrection. It begins:

“Something strange is happening—there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh, and hell trembles with fear.

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep.

Desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captive Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve.

The Lord approaches, bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory.”

There is a stream of imagination amongst the Fathers of the Church in which Jesus is portrayed both as a mighty warrior and as the victim who sacrifices himself.

It is this mixture—the courageous warrior and the gift of his life for others—that provides a balance between the vulnerability of love and the heroic struggle to overcome evil.

The Lost Sense of Christian Heroism

This struggle against evil is not as much at the forefront of the presentation of Christianity as, theologically, it might be.

When I cast my mind back to my teenage years, one of the things that kept me from pursuing Christ and the Gospel was the experience of Christians as verging on presenting as semi-pathetic as characters. The Anglican clergy I knew were semi- feminised and had little of the aura of heroism about them.

The teenage Christians I knew were at the mild end of the character spectrum. I saw little that seemed heroic or courageous or powerful in their Christianity. This may have been a reflection of my incapacity of spiritual perception. It turned out that I was completely mistaken.

Two Kinds of Courage

In terms of courage, masculinity was expressed through superior force and determination in the secular adventure stories I grew up with.

But, the struggle that Christianity represents and embarks on takes place in a different medium from the one I was used to in secular adventure stories, and heroism there is of a more subtle but equally powerful kind.

The courage I read about growing up was the courage of warfare—violence overcoming violence with more violence.

But as C. S. Lewis writes, human beings are amphibious creatures. We live both in the animal realm and in the spiritual realm.

As it happens, courage is required in both.

• In the physical, animal realm, it is a courage born of brute strength and determination.

• In the spiritual realm, just as much courage is required—but here the enemy is more subtle and invisible.

Our enemy is evil and perversion.

Struggling against this spiritual enemy requires just as much courage, determination and heroism—but our weapons require more skill, moral sophistication and subtlety. They are patience, forgiveness, generosity, humility, wisdom and sacrifice.

Christ the Warrior

The early Church Fathers understood this.

So in the ancient homily for Holy Saturday, Jesus is presented as a warrior who descends into the underworld, where captives live in darkness and in the shadow of death. He goes to free our ancestors, bearing the weapon of the Cross as his sword.

The great Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood conceives of Jesus in the same way.

Instead of a helpless man overcome by brutal soldiers, through the eyes of the great tree that was cut down to become the cross that bore the mighty Son of God, we see a noble and courageous warrior going willingly towards death and sacrifice.

“Then the young hero (who was God Almighty) got ready, resolute and strong.
He climbed onto the lofty gallows-tree, bold in the sight of many, when he intended to redeem mankind.”

And the Cross itself speaks:

“I trembled when the warrior embraced me, yet I dared not bow to the earth… Upright I had to stand.”

And again:

“The resolute hero stripped himself, climbed the high gallows, brave in the sight of many, eager to ransom mankind.”

The War Against Evil

In the Book of Revelation, Christ is presented at the end of time as a rider on a white horse, faithful and true, judging and making war—with a sword proceeding from his mouth.

The war, of course, is a war against evil.
The sword is his truth.

In the Gospel, Jesus casts his own ministry as an invasion of Satan’s kingdom:

“No one can enter a strong man’s house… unless he first binds the strong man.” (Mark 3:27)

A Distorted Image of Christ

Our Victorian ancestors did us an enormous disservice when they presented a mild, androgynous Jesus in flowing robes, with an indeterminate softness in stained glass.

Instead, we have in the Gospels and in the early Church a vision of a heroic Redeeme; a strong athletic man who walks too and fro, the length of Israel, confronting the power of evil, the hordes of infesting demons, the pride of the supercilious and comfortable, overcoming them all, and rescuing his own people who had become captives to evil, and hostages to death.

The Fathers: Christ the Conqueror

Irenaeus of Lyons portrays Christ as recapitulating Adam’s story, but by entering the battlefield where humanity had lost, confronting all evil and domination, winning humanity back from its captivity to sin, deception and illusion.

He writes:

“The Lord… recapitulated in himself the ancient formation of man, that he might kill sin, deprive death of its power, and give life to man.”

And again:

“He fought and conquered. For he was man contending for the fathers, and through obedience cancelling their disobedience.”

Gregory of Nyssa describes salvation as a divine ambush:

“The deity was hidden under the veil of our nature, that so, as with a ravenous fish, the hook of the deity might be swallowed along with the bait of flesh… and thus death might be destroyed.”

And John Chrysostom proclaims in triumphant irony:

“Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.”

Holy Saturday: The Harrowing of Hell

When we find ourselves come to Holy Saturday, poised between the death and resurrection, we have come to the day we commemorate the harrowing of hell.

This is the day when we are reminded that Christ descends as a conqueror to break open the gates of bronze behind which death holds humanity in a rigid grip, and frees the captives.

It is a spiritual liberation raid.

What Meekness Really Means

We get Christ wrong when we misread the Beatitudes as we hear that the '“meek shall inherit the earth.”

Meekness is not weakness.

In the Greek vocabulary used in the Gospels, meekness is not subjugation. It is the word used for:

• a sheathed, sharpened, balanced sword, ready for battle

• an energetic and dangerous warhorse held in restraint by training and obedience.

‘Meek’ is profound power, courage, energy—held in disciplined obedience. It disciplined restraint of something that would otherwise be highly destructive.

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The mainstream news are silent about it, but one of our platforms has picked up the fact that King Charles has refused call to give an Easter message this year to the Christian community in his realm in a way that matches his encouragement to the Islamic community during Ramadan.

Should he refuse?

It is true that there is no general tradition of making an Easter message in the same way there’s a tradition of making a Christmas message. The Palace have made that clear and are implying that’s all there is to be said. BUT - people, sensing his favour towards Islam, have asked for one; at the very leasty for the sake of parity.

So there are three issues, I think, here.

1. One is the sense of public perception.

2. The second is his role constitutionally as Defender of the Faith.

3. And the third is the meaning of Easter itself, and whether or not it’s consistent with his multicultural position.

So let’s look at the first, - the sense of public expectation.

The Exclusivity of Islam

King Charles issued a warm message to the Islamic community at the beginning of Ramadan this year, 2026. He didn’t issue a greeting to the Christians whose Lent parallels it. In fact, he was notably silent.

However, we are constantly told that he wants to be inclusive. One of the ways of being inclusive would have been to say a greeting for Ramadan and a greeting for Lent. Then there would have been a sense of even-handedness.

But his exclusivity of Christianity raised some eyebrows and some questions.

Last year he gave another message at the end of Ramadan to mark Eid, the end of fasting.

So last year, - a message to the Islamic community in the spring as they finished Ramadan.

This year, a message to the Islamic community as they began Ramadan.

In neither this year nor last year did he mention Christianity and Lent. It seems odd to his country.

The inevitable perception is, therefore, that he favours Islam, because when it comes to the Christian festivals like Christmas, what he does then is to offer an inclusive view. So he includes all faiths. He uses Christmas as a platform for celebrating Islamic faith and Jewish faith and Hindu and Sikh.

In other words, there isn’t anything specifically Christian about his commitment or his public pronouncements. When it’s Christian, it’s a platform for inclusivity.

But - when it’s Islamic, it’s exclusively Islamic.

What kind of impression does that create amongst his Christian subjects, who are in fact the majority?

It gives a sense that actually he is more sympathetic to Islam. This, rightly or wrongly, is the sense that people have. People even wonder if he’s converted to Islam.

What does it mean to be ‘Fidelis Defensor’?

But let’s move beyond the subjective sense of the way the message plays and the damage it does to his relationship with his subjects, and look at what’s required of him.

Many people think that the title “Defender of the Faith” is the one he inherited from the one the Pope gave to Henry VIII when Henry attacked Luther over the seven sacraments. It isn’t. The Pope—you won’t be surprised to know—withdrew it quite quickly.

The Houses of Parliament were miffed that their monarch no longer had this estimable title. So they decided to issue it themselves.

Of course, this is a different faith now. This is the Anglican Protestant faith. But Parliament bestowed upon the monarch the title “Defender of the Faith”, and the monarch has worn it to this day.

The monarch has to make an oath. It’s not just a title he carries. He has to make an oath to defend the faith, to be Supreme Governor of the Church. This is the inheritance of King Henry VIII’s anti-Pope stance. Henry made himself anti-Pope in this country, which translated into ‘Supreme Governor of the Church’.

If Charles is Supreme Governor of the Church—and he is, it’s part of his coronation covenant—then where is his sense of celebration?

Where is his sense of value, of encouragement?

The fact is, Christianity throughout the West—but particularly in this country, and Anglicanism above all—is beginning to sink into decay. It’s demoralised. It’s lost its way. It’s feeling very much unloved.

All the institutions that have been taken over by the hard left, by wokery, dislike Christianity.

It only has one defender left effectively in the public sphere, since politicians are usually too shy to offer their allegiance—with one or two notable exceptions like Jacob Rees-Mogg as a Catholic.

The King is almost the last public institution left.

You might think that, just as an expression of his Christian identity, of the need of the Christian civilisation, that he would do something to give some extra confidence or boost.

So it’s true—the Palace are right—there is no tradition of an annual Easter message.

But wouldn’t this be the moment for the King to start a tradition?

Wouldn’t this be the moment to say the source of Christian faith is a profound hope produced by the resurrection of Jesus?

This is the hope that good triumphs over evil, that forgiveness triumphs over hate, that love triumphs over rejection, that the reconciliation of God triumphs over our sense of detachment and alienation.

Easter provides a moment of profound hope.

Does the King not think that perhaps his people are in need of hope?

There’s another kind of hope Easter provides.

It’s the hope that the life of the soul, the life of integrity, the life of the metaphysical survives beyond death—that we are more than what we appear to be on the surface.

We’re more than biological creatures.

This spirit within us, this gist, this hunger for eternity, for meaning—we are told—outlasts our body.

And the only reason we know it is because Jesus rose from the dead.

Given the angst in the country, given the public health issues, the mental health issues—would this not be a moment for the King to use his platform to say:

“Be of good cheer, my subjects.

Jesus rose from the dead.

There is hope.

There is life after death.

And because there’s life after death, there’s also life before death.

Let’s take some encouragement.

Go to church. Say your prayers. And Here are some achievements in our civilisation where lives have been turned around by notable conversions:”

There could be a role of enormous encouragement and profound influence available to the King if, without making himself over-intensely spiritual, he simply relayed the Christian message.

But there’s a third aspect.

Mohammed is a compromised prophet.

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Introduction

As we approach Holy Week and allow ourselves to be drawn into the Gospel narrative of Maundy Thursday, it is perhaps inevitable that we find ourselves facing the deeper meaning of the Last Supper and its relationship to the Mass.

What is it that we are doing? Remembrance or sacrifice? How much of either?

We find ourselves confronted with a question that is not merely historical, but also theological, and even defines the disastrous schism that the Reformation tragically inflicted on the Catholic Church and its understanding of its central rite. Tragically we find that large numbers of Catholics misunderstand and underestimate what happens at Mass.

This is connected to our grasp of what exactly is happening at the Last Supper.

Is it a meal that acts as primarily or just partially as an instrument of remembrance?

Or is it the beginning of an event that incorporates remembrance but stretches beyond the limitations of time and space, because it embodies a recapitulation, the sacramental making-present of the sacrifice on Calvary as well.

The Catholic Church has always seen the Last Supper as the first movement in a single, unified act stretching across the two days of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, that becomes one event, one sacrifice.

It is this unity of drama—a meal that is inseparable from a sacrifice—that constitutes the Mass as the Church has understood it from the earliest apostolic times.

The Question of the Missing Fourth Cup

Not everyone is familiar with the question of the fourth cup.

It was the theologian Scott Hahn who brought this to the Church’s attention in his book ‘the Fourth Cup’. Here he synthesised three streams -Jewish Passover structure, Gospel narrative details and Catholic sacrificial theology and forged a single, vivid explanatory key.

However, not everyone knows that the Passover rite is made up or structured by the four cups. So it may be a surprise to many Christians who are going to be celebrating a memorial of the Last supper tonight that the question of the missing fourth cup changes not only the way we understand this one distinctive and unique passover, but also the way we do the Eucharist, or Mass, that is based on it.

The missing fourth cup provides the key to understanding what Jesus did, and interpreting how he constructed the framework of that last passover in a way that reveals the full span of the Eucharistic drama.

What is implicit in the Gospel narrative, but missed because we don’t notice it, or understand the significance of the words that describe the event, is the question of the cup that was not drunk.

Once understand what the ritual of the Passover was that constituted the Last Supper, structured and deliberate, we find ourselves with the puzzle of facing an unfinished ritual.

The last cup, the final act, the cup of consummation is missing. It doesn’t happen.

The Passover is, in fact, stopped before its end and left incomplete when Jesus leaves the Upper Room.

Why might that be?

The answer is that Good Friday is not separate from Maundy Thursday, but is its fulfilment.

And it is here that the difference between a purely commemorative understanding of the Last Supper and the Catholic understanding of the Mass becomes clear:

Does the Passover end in the Upper Room—or on the Cross?

The Structure of the Passover

The importance of the fourth cup becomes clearer when we attend to what each of the four cups of the Passover represents.

The first cup is the cup of sanctification. It sets the meal apart. It marks the night as different from all others—a night consecrated to God. This is the Passover, the reliving of the night when God intervened to set the people of Israel free from slavery, and protected from the coming angel of death, because they took the hyssop branches and smeared their lintels and doorposts with the blood of the sacrificed lamb. The first cup sets this night aside from every other meal in the year. It sanctifies the night.

The second cup is the cup of proclamation. Here the story is told. The Exodus is recalled, and the question is answered: why is this night different? Because God has acted to save His people. The second cup is the signal for the re-telling of the miracle of deliverance.

The third cup, the cup of blessing, is the moment when remembering turns to thanksgiving. It is here that the meal turns most explicitly toward the profound expression of gratitude for the covenant, sacrifice, and everything that flows from that.

It is easy, particularly with the words of St Paul in First Epistle to the Corinthians—“the cup of blessing which we bless”—to imagine something more general- as in ‘here is a cup that we are going to use for a blessing. But this is not general. It is precise. It is a technical moment in the Passover liturgy. It is the third cup. First sanctification, then proclamation, and now blessing.

And then comes the fourth cup—the cup of consummation.

This is the cup that brings the whole event to completion. It seals what has been remembered, proclaimed, and blessed.

Because the Passover is not simply a meal—it is a liturgical participation in salvation.

Every cup has meaning.
Every stage has purpose.

But, this Passover, this supper, there is not fourth cup. Consummation does not happen.

The Interrupted Passover

So on this particular night, something extraordinary happens.

The Passover is interrupted—three quarters of the way through.

The Gospel narrative fits exactly with the structure of the four cups.

We are told that Jesus takes “the cup after supper.”

This is not a casual description, as in ‘so supper has come to an end, and at that point Jesus reaches for a cup’. It is a choreographed detail. The cup of blessing is scheduled to be taken, after supper.

And suddenly Jesus departs from the script, and it is here that Jesus speaks the words that have shaped the Church ever since:

“This is the blood of the covenant…”

Instantly, everything is being reconfigured. The blood of the lamb was the blood of the covenant. Now there is a new covenant, and the wine of the cup of blessing is the blood. Then what happend? The disciples must have wondered what these changes meant, and what would be the next change. The answer was that there was a break - Jesus left the passover, and looking back, we see that he left it to complete it elsewhere. He was to complete it on the cross.

But how will he take the fourth cup?

Jesus addresses exactly that question as it hangs in the air.

For he says:

“I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the Kingdom of God comes.”

And then he gets up and leaves.

No fourth cup.
No consummation.

The Passover has stopped short.

The Fourth Cup on the Cross

So where is the fourth cup?

The answer is that the Passover has not been abandoned. It has been extended.

It will be completed in the sacrifice of the Lamb.

On the Cross, as Jesus hangs there, He says:

“I thirst.”

Suddenly we see this it not just physical. It is liturgical. It is theological; it is part of the drama of the interrupted Passover..

How do we know?

Because St John tells us that the wine (that we now see constitutes the fourth cup, the cup of consummation is brought to him, how? It is brought to Him on a branch of hyssop.

This is no incidental detail.

In the Book of Exodus, at the first Passover, hyssop is used to apply the blood of the lamb:

“Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood…”

Hyssop is the instrument by which the saving blood is applied.

And now it appears again.

So at Calvary, hyssop is not just how it happens, it is ‘why’ it happens both practical and theological.

It tells us that this is the fourth cup of the Passover.

That what began in the Upper Room is now reaching its fulfilment.

After receiving the wine, Jesus says:

“It is finished.”

The Greek makes this a multi-layered word of considerable depth.

τετέλεσται (tetelestai) (John 19.30)

etelestai comes from the Greek verb τελέω (teleō), which means:

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When Jesus stands before Pontius Pilate, two worldviews collide—and in that collision an agenda is set, one that has shaped centuries of struggle and misunderstanding in the two thousand years that have followed.

The Question at the Centre

At the heart of the confrontation lies a single question:

Did Jesus have a political message?

The Sanhedrin had tried to force Him into a political role, but He refused to cooperate. During His trial before Pilate, He remains largely silent—until Pilate asks Him directly whether He is a king. And then Jesus makes the crucial distinction: His kingdom is not of this world.

At that moment, Pilate attempts to release Him—and fails.

Two Forms of Power

It would fall later to Augustine of Hippo to give one of the most profound and articulate accounts of this tension in The City of God: the relationship between two paradigms, two worldviews, two entirely different and competing forms of power.

Politics concerns itself with power on earth.
The Gospel concerns itself with the transformation of the human heart.

And yet, the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the state—between Church and state—has been interwoven ever since.

The Fragile Balance

One of the great achievements of Catholic political theology, particularly in the age of monarchy, was the way in which raw political power was made accountable: the conscience of the king or emperor was, in principle, subject to the moral authority of the successor of St Peter.

In the secular age that has followed the Enlightenment, this balance has become deeply unstable. Modern sensibilities grow uneasy whenever a pope speaks into political questions. It is as though secular philosophy, wishing to operate free from religious ethics, rebukes the Church: remain within your spiritual sphere, and keep out of political affairs.

But the Catholic position is more subtle than that.

The Undivided Human Person

The Kingdom of Heaven and the kingdoms of this world are distinct—but the human person is not divided. There is no sealed “religious compartment” within us. The human heart, more open to the Holy Spirit than the calculating intellect, cannot be separated from the moral life we live in society.

Morality and ethics cannot be divided neatly into “sacred” and “secular.”

Where, after all, does the secular state derive its moral framework?
Where does the language of human rights come from?

It is not self-generated. It emerges from a Christian understanding of the human person—an anthropology that confers a sacred dignity which no purely secular system could have invented for itself.

Palm Sunday and the Question of War

And so, when the pope reflects on Palm Sunday—on the encounter between Jesus and Pilate—and begins to speak about the realities of international conflict, the media becomes uneasy. The question is quickly raised: is he being political?

At the same time, the drama of Palm Sunday unfolds against the backdrop of real conflict—in particular, tensions involving Iran and the wider geopolitical order.

Commentators grow increasingly anxious about what they describe as “Christian nationalism” shaping the posture of the United States. Donald Trump may have avoided explicitly religious language, but not all those around him have been so cautious.

Pete Hegseth, now associated with the language of national defence, has spoken in terms that draw directly on the Psalms:

“Blessed be the Lord who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle.”

A Prophetic Intervention

Against this backdrop, the pope’s words take on a particular sharpness.

Reflecting on Palm Sunday, he insists:

“God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

And he turns to the prophet Isaiah:

“Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.” (Isaiah 1:15)

Is this the language of diplomacy—or of prophecy?

It is unmistakably prophetic. And as the prophets always do, it addresses not political strategy, but the moral condition of those who wield power.

A Personal Moment

Leaving Vespers on Palm Sunday, having sung these themes in the psalms themselves, I received a call from LBC. I was asked to join an interview with Clare Foges, who wanted to know whether the pope’s words were aimed at the Trump administration. She quoted extensively from statements that suggested an increasingly apocalyptic religious tone in American political rhetoric.

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Pope Leo Saves the Church from Schism

Unexpectedly and dramatically, Pope Leo XIV has written to the bishops of France, encouraging them to find practical solutions to heal the current rift in the Catholic Church over the liturgical culture war which Pope Francis set in motion by promulgating Traditionis Custodes.

Bishops throughout the world began to suppress the Latin Mass, causing intense distress and discomfort to many conservative Catholics.

Perhaps even worse than that, this action cemented in the life of the Church an understanding that the Second Vatican Council should be read as creating a rupture with the centuries of faithful Catholic witness and development that preceded it.

The Pope has now encouraged the bishops to aim at healing liturgical divisions and fostering unity with communities attached to the traditional Roman Rite (vetus ordo).

The letter itself was sent on the Pope’s behalf to the French Episcopal Conference, which significantly met in Lourdes for its spring plenary assembly beginning on March 24.

A revealing encounter

I found this particularly moving and significant.

Readers of this platform may remember my surprise writing of a recent occasion when I was invited to a small dinner with a diocesan bishop in the north of France and one of his parish priests. They were both admirable men, whom I liked very much, and with whom I found myself on the same wavelength in many respects — until we came to the question of the traditional Latin Mass.

At that point, as we reflected on signs of hope for the future — particularly the remarkable phenomenon of 20,000 young French Catholics making an annual pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres — I was astonished, and completely wrong-footed, by the bishop’s hostility to this sign of fervent renewal.

As the atmosphere cooled and expressions hardened, I asked why he and his colleague regarded these courageous, devoted, bright-eyed young Catholics with such disfavour.

The answer came back: because they are schismatic. By attending the traditional Latin Mass, they were said to be setting themselves against the authority of the Council.

This was classic rupture language. And I realised the matter was not up for discussion. For them, it was already a settled cultural and theological fact.

A decisive shift

Which is why this gesture from the Pope to the French bishops is so extraordinary.

It is not simply an invitation to greater pastoral generosity. It signals a change in the direction of travel for the Catholic Church as a whole.

What Pope Leo has effectively done is to reaffirm that the Latin Mass remains part of the Church’s inheritance. There is no rupture centred on the Council. In doing so, he confirms Pope Benedict’s theologically precise and deeply important analysis: that the Council must be read in continuity with the Church’s tradition.

At a stroke, he may have begun to bring an end to the culture war within the Catholic Church.

What the Pope actually said

It is worth attending closely to his words:

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Sources in Buckingham Palace have made an announcement about Prince William’s faith.

They have told us that his original well publicised agnosticism has experienced a slight warming and he is more comfortable with the idea of the Church of England as the Established Church. Let’s look at what this might mean and whether it is a help or a hindrance in the present circumstances.

The impression he has given about Christianity since becoming an adult has been one of uninterested, or perhaps disinterested, agnosticism.

The way this entered the public arena was through the royal author Robert Hardman, who quoted William in his 2024 book. He says, in substance, that in royal circles it is well known William does not share King Charles’s spiritual instincts, nor his grandmother’s settled Anglican devotion.

William respects the institution of religion more than he is personally at ease in a setting of faith. Hardman used a fairly distinctive phrase, saying that William is “not instinctively comfortable in a faith environment.”

This week, however, sees the installation of the new female Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, and William is due to attend.

His PR machine has chosen this moment to put out a new and very different message in its bulletin.

Referring to the prince, a source told The Sunday Times:

“His feeling is, again, I might not be at church every day, but I believe in it…”

. I want to support it and this is an important aspect of my role and the next role, and I will take it very seriously, in my own way”.’

the source said.

“The Prince of Wales’s commitment to the Church of England is sometimes quieter than people expect, and for that reason it is not always fully understood.”

They added:

“At a time when institutions can be seen simply through a social or cultural lens, he understands that the Church’s role goes beyond this. It is not only part of the nation’s heritage, but a living expression of faith, rooted in prayer, compassion and a belief in grace and redemption.”

It is always good, in a game of chess, to be able to think several moves ahead. That lesson applies to political life as well.

When Queen Elizabeth II died, it was evident that there was going to be a change in the way the monarchy expressed its religious commitment to the constitutional settlement founded in 1688. King Charles III was uncomfortable with restricting himself to Christianity, and wanted instead to express his interest in faith as a general principle. He had already warned us that this was how he intended to embody monarchy.

From a Christian point of view, there is a serious criticism to be made here. If one follows Jesus Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, that does not easily permit a relativistic adaptation into some universalised religion of faith-in-general.

People have of course tried it. But it has always turned out to be incompatible with the real thing.

In time, I suspect we shall look back on Charles’s multi-faith spirituality as a dreadful mistake of judgement. But as we look forward, another difficulty presents itself. Charles became king at the very end of his life and, already suffering from cancer, may not have many years left.

The problem facing the House of Windsor is that Prince William was, in one sense, too honest about his spiritual vacancy. It became known — particularly through conversations recorded by the royal biographer Robert Hardman — that he was at best vague about faith, and not at all comfortable with inheriting the role of Defender of the Faith.

This was short-sighted, both on William’s part and on that of the Royal Family, because many people felt a serious discomfort at the gap between having little or no Christian conviction and yet being required, at a coronation, to make solemn acts of identification, protection, and endorsement in relation to the Christian faith.

So, there was a problem. The question was: when was the Establishment going to try to fix it?

I found myself being interviewed twice on LBC about this recently by the perceptive Clare Foges and the following day by Sheila Fogarty.

Clare first asked, quite rightly, whether we should not simply welcome any movement in any person from vague agnosticism towards a clearer articulation of faith and belief.

The answer is that of course we can — and should. Not everyone has a dramatic conversion to the reality and vividness of the existence of God, or to the resurrection and presence of Christ. William James wrote particularly perceptively about the difference between instant and gradual conversion.

There is nothing less honourable, nor less ultimately powerful, about gradual conversion simply because it is less dramatic.

But is that what William was expressing?

The thing about an experience of faith, or of God, is that when somebody moves from nothing to something, they can usually explain what has happened in a way that reflects its authenticity and its effect upon them.

The difficulty with the bulletin announcing this supposed shift in William’s religious outlook was that it sounded less like testimony and more like strategy. It had the unmistakable tone of institutional positioning. Real faith may grow gradually and quietly; but even then, it usually carries some note of personal reality. What was presented here sounded instead like a line being managed.

Essentially, we find ourselves facing two problems, one more urgent than the other.

The first is the extent to which mild religious interest is sufficient to bridge the gap between the demands made by the office of the monarch and William’s personal state of mind.

In a more neutral political and religious context, it might be possible to build a bridge between a certain kind of private religious agnosticism and the overt demands created by the relationship between the state and the monarchy, which requires the monarch to be Supreme Governor of the Church and Defender of the Faith.

But these are not ordinary times.

Elsewhere, I have written that if King Charles were truly to act responsibly for his subjects, he would intervene politically to address the mass grooming and rape of white girls in his realm at the hands of largely Pakistani Muslim men.

One might also have expected intervention in order to resist the erosion of free speech by a far-left government increasingly inclined to demonise freedom of speech and opinion by redefining disagreement as one phobia or another, and then criminalising it.

Despite the fact that King Charles wishes to present himself as a defender of faiths in general, he has given no indication that he has any intention of stepping into an increasingly deteriorating and contested religious arena in order to do what his office ostensibly requires: to defend the Christian faith.

A sober assessment of the timing of Prince William’s announcement might take into account the possibility that King Charles’s health is not at its best in the aftermath of his cancer diagnosis, and that the political establishment knows it may need to prepare the way for a coronation sooner rather than later. The gap between William’s rather vacant personal agnosticism and the demands of a coronation settlement is too wide to be bridged without some kind of interim development.

The difficulty with a Palace source speaking on William’s behalf is that there is nothing personal in the detail of the announcement at all.

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EWTN arranged a brief interview last summer - it’s not very long or very deep, it’s conversational in tone, but it offers a light overview.

On their chanel it’s been viewed over 300,000 times. If you haven’t seen it before, it may be of interest to have access to it here.

In the steps of St John Henry Newman - Why I left Canterbury for Rome....

“As a clergyman for nearly forty years, an academic, canon theologian, and longtime member of the Anglican Synod, I was also appointed a chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II. It was, outwardly at least, a considerable honour. One was invited to garden parties at Buckingham Palace, receptions at Windsor, and all the elegant ceremonial trappings of the ecclesiastical establishment.

But beneath the surface, something had already begun to trouble me deeply.

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Infanticide

On the 18th of March, in the fourth week of Lent, the House of Lords, the senior chamber of this country’s parliamentary legislature, did something so scandalous, so obscene, so beyond comprehension that it is difficult to find words to describe and respond to it.

It legislated for infanticide.

Whatever arguments may exist about when life beings (though for the Catholic, only too obviously at the moment of conception) a baby at full term in the womb waiting to be born is a child; and passing legislation to destroy that child on one side of the birth canal rather than the other, is murder.

Under the influence of the extreme left political agenda and the feminism that informs it, the Lords’ legitimised infanticide. It decriminalised abortion up to the very second of birth.

The temptation is of course to reach for the most powerful combination of words available to us to express our distress, doubt, and rage, but we need to do more than that. We need to set this act in a framework that demonstrates the extent of its seriousness beyond, if one can even say such a thing, merely the fact that our state permits (and by permitting one could argue promoting) the killing of children.

What has Christianity to offer as an analysis of the strategy?

It doesn’t need the Church to comment on how this is a matter of serious moral turpitude and civic self-destruction. Any fool, any secular agency, any fair-minded person can see that, although the Catholic Church in particular has rightly made this a primary expression of its engagement with an increasingly degenerate state.

But what the Church can do is to bring a metaphysical analysis to it and explain how the situation is even more serious than a bare recitation of the facts themselves, grotesque as they are.

This article provides a wider and specifically metaphysical context for what has taken place. The act doesn’t just stand on its own demerits, but we are feeding a monster, and this is a monster that will destroy us spiritually, morally, and finally socially and civically.

How did the Church of England Respond ?

Whatever view you take of Anglicanism today, there is a responsibility of acting as a Christian conscience of the nation. This was a debate, this was a moment when every single Anglican bishop should have been in the House of Lords wearing a face like thunder, speaking with the utmost conviction and rhetoric, and voting together to defeat the motion that was passed.

You may know this already, but the state gives 26 bishops the right to sit in the House of Lords and vote on legislation.

Although reports have been muddled, it is inexcusable that all 26 did not turn up to vote on this matter of profound national importance.

What is the Church of England for? If it was for anything at all, it would be to put the whole of its weight behind a moral protest of the most intense and sincere kind at crossroads like this.

In fact 11 are reported to have attended the debate. 15 were inexplicably detained elsewhere on other business.

They did of course, vote against the appalling legislation. I hope it’s not too cynical to say that that much at least could be expected. But of the bishops there, the most senior, Sarah Mullally, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, has made her name in public affairs by speaking out in support of abortion in principle.

As an enthusiastic supporter of abortion in principle, she has welcomed the death of babies if they in any way threaten the autonomy of the woman who conceived the child. Although we should be grateful, It is no great compliment to note that even she had the wit to see that full-term abortion is moral turpitude beyond what even moderate Feminism can cope with, and voted against it.

The extraordinary contradiction of feminism is that even when the infant in the womb is a girl, they’re willing to destroy the little girl in the name of a political principle supposedly in defence of all the feminine.

The logical confusion at the heart of this ought to give us an indication that something else is at work.

It’s exactly when things don’t make sense rationally and we can’t explain them logically, that we are entitled to ask if there is a metaphysical or a spiritual dynamic at work here? And it will be no surprise to those reading this paper that we propose that there is one indeed; and a most serious one.

For those who take evil seriously, the experience of the Church down the ages is that we struggle not just with disordered people, or divided minds, or perverse desires only, but we struggle with spiritual evil that expresses itself through the channel of human beings given over to its influence, or ultimately its dark and tragic control.

There has long been an understanding that if you sacrifice to gods, you strengthen the influence of the power that they have. In other words, you intensify their leverage of destruction. Much depends on what you sacrifice, but if you offer a human sacrifice this whole process intensifies. If you offer the sacrifice of innocent human children to the dark gods, this intensifies even further.

What is the mind and experience of the Church on this matter down the ages?

From the earliest centuries, the Catholic Church has equated abortion with grave homicide and linked it to pagan child sacrifice offered to demons.

The Old Testament explicitly prohibits offering children to Moloch (Leviticus 18:21; 20:2–5), describing abortion as a profanation that invites demonic influence.

Psalm 106:37–38 records that during a dreadful time in their history, even the Israelites sacrificed their sons and daughters to demons.

This, of course, represents a period when the people of Israel were seduced away from the worship of the one true God to the worship of fertility religion and the gods of the earth’s harvest.

This was part of the bitter struggle the prophets engaged in when the children of Israel went running after false gods. Moloch is one of the darker sub-divinities who demands child sacrifice, and tragically, horribly, some of the children of Israel offered human sacrifice. This is what the psalm is referring to when it talks about “sacrificing their sons and their daughters to demons”.

St Paul too, in 1 Corinthians 10:20 reminds the early Church that pagan sacrifices are not value-free, or harmless cultural exercises, but they are specifically and actually offered to demons.

The early Church Fathers applied this insight and understanding directly to abortion and infanticide, and taught that both were continuations of these demonic rites denounced in the first covenant.

The Didache, one of the earliest post-apostolic documents (70 to 100 AD), commands: “You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.”

Tertullian (c.197–220 AD) and St Hippolytus condemned abortion as murder before birth, associating it, of course, with pagan morality.

St John Chrysostom (c.391) described abortion as turning the womb into “a chamber of murder”, tying it to demonic idolatry and fornication.

Some, like Basil the Great, equated abortion with infanticide, recognising both as animated by the same spirit.

The Church saw Moloch being worshipped in surrounding cultures(sometimes by that name; sometimes the same entity with a different name).

Medieval theology reiterated this mapping of the spiritual landscape and sustained the prohibition. St Augustine and later canonists classified abortion as a grave sin against natural law. St Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) held it constituted an absolute and moral infraction at any stage, as contrary to divine order.

Exorcism rites and baptism formulas central to the Church’s life renounce “the devil and all his works”, specifically encompassing idols and blood offerings.

Grave sins against innocent life are understood to create spiritual openings with demonic influence, aligning with the ancient ritual pattern.

The Church has been consistent, determined, and crystal clear about the depth of depravity that abortion and infanticide of any kind represent.

St John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae (1995) dramatically described the culture of death, specifically including abortion, as a systematic attack on innocent life with powerful spiritual dimensions.

Catholic activists have framed abortion as a demonic battle, with clinics described as ‘altars of Moloch’ on our streets, and ritualised child sacrifice for personal or societal gain, drawing consistently and deliberately on the patterns condemned by the prophets of the first covenant (Jeremiah 19:5–6 ^“and have built the high places of Baal ^lto burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or decree, nor did it come into my mind— 6 therefore, behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when this place shall no more be called Topheth, or ^othe Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter.”)"

The ministry of deliverance and exorcism constitutes private revelation, but for those who take their faith seriously this aspect of the Church’s struggle is often helpfully illustrative of the dynamics of the spiritual life both personally and corporately.

One of its clearest and most popular exponents is

Fr Chad Ripperger.

He is a traditionalist priest and exorcist and has spoken out powerfully, condemning abortion as a grave moral evil, and warning his listeners that it constitutes a modern child sacrifice empowering demonic forces.

In his natural law analysis, abortion violates the unified process of conception, frustrates the goods proper to life, undermines parental authority, and harms the common good.

He has become an increasingly influential Catholic voice in our generation. In his vivid language, abortion constitutes an ancient pagan sacrifice which has become institutionalised and protected by principalities. Like Moloch, it demands innocent blood for temporal benefits.

And beyond Moloch, he diagnoses, there is Baal, identified as a demon of child sacrifice. In his view,

“Clinics replicate ancient altars, with the same mechanism: shedding innocent blood for autonomy or convenience, transferring authority from the mother, who has embarked on the destruction of a child in this way, to the demons themselves.

He notes the demons’ intense strategy of the protection of abortion and suggests that one reason is that it deprives unbaptised souls of the beatific vision.

In his view it constitutes a particularly powerful aspect of the struggle that spiritual evil engages in to pervert God’s plan in creation by depriving Him of the obedience, love, and presence of the souls of humanity.

In his vivid language, intended to wake the Church up, abortion constitutes an ancient pagan sacrifice institutionalised and protected by principalities.

In a passage circulated around 2025, he wrote:

“Moloch simply traded the bronze idol for the white coat… Child sacrifice did not end in the ancient world. It simply went underground, put on the lab coat, and got government funding. Moloch is not dead. He is enthroned.”

Father Ripperger’s insights and analysis stem from his own long and well-informed experience of the ministry of deliverance and exorcism, and are entirely consistent with Catholic tradition: the pagan gods are indeed demons.

Other well-known exorcists confirm this analysis, though often speaking in less explicit detail.

Fr. Gabriele Amorth (who died in 2016) condemned abortion because in his experience it opened doors to oppression and constituted a parting act on the integrity and functioning of the family and on innocence itself.

Stephen Rossetti, in his 2021 Exorcist Diary entry on spiritual abortion, like Fr Ripperger, invoked Moloch, Baal, Abzu, Abyzou and all the demons of abortion in pro-life prayers. He also wrote about his experience of demonic taunting in possession cases that were tied to women with a history of abortion.

One of the best-known exorcists today, Fr Carlos Martins, who is the author of ‘The Exorcist Files’ and a personal friend, told me last night in a telephone conversation as we discussed this, that he wholly endorsed his colleagues’ experiences and analyses.

Marian apparitions: direct and symbolic opposition to abortion

The apparitions of Our Lady have during the history of the Church confronted serious crises that damaged or distorted the relationship of God to His people.

The approved apparition of Our Lady of Laus (1664 to 1718 in France) to Benoîte Rencurel explicitly directed a rebuke at those committing abortion and made impassioned calls to conversion from impurity and scandal. This apparition was recognised in 2008, and a part of its impact was to frame abortion as a grave sin requiring sacramental repentance, aligning with the metaphysical reality that sin opens souls to influence while Mary’s mercy closes it.

You will already be aware no doubt, of the serious connection to be made between Our Lady of Guadalupe (1531) and the issue of child sacrifice. Our Lady appeared pregnant to St Juan Diego, and part of the impact of her apparition was to replace Aztec child sacrifice to bloodthirsty deities with the Gospel of life.

The phenomenon of human and in particular child sacrifice among the Aztecs is well known to all who have studied the apparition and the culture it spoke to.

Although secular opponents and historians have given the Catholic impact in South America less than flattering press, they seldom take account of the confrontation of child sacrifice both as a sociological disaster and as a metaphysical one.

St John Paul II in 1999 declared Our Lady patroness of the unborn. The effect of her apparition was to crush the demon of human sacrifice. The serpent depicted beneath Our Lady’s feet symbolises demonic forces fed by ancient and modern innocent blood offerings, which become reframed as now institutionalised under medical and legal cover. The contrast drawn by St John Paul II is stark: false gods demand blood for power; the true God offers His blood for our salvation.

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A number of subscribers asked if I could make a recording of St Patrick’s ‘Confessio’ - or Confession. It lasts about 40 minutes. And you have both the recording and the text here.

I chose a translation that felt accessible to us - a contemporary voice.

A few words of introduction to the text:

What is exciting about this extraordinary text is that we are being written to , or spoken to directly by Patrick. We usually have to learn about people from a biographer, or friend - or even a critic. But here we have a voice coming straight out to us from the 5th Century. It has an astonishing freshness. It was written somewhere near 460 AD.

It is a defence, an explanation of his life as a bishop and a missionary to the people of Ireland. It describes his experience of God in a vivid and most remarkable way.

He is a Catholic bishop, formed in the late Roman world, saturated in Scripture, and compelled, against his own expectations, to carry the Gospel into Ireland.

What you are about to hear is not a legend, a reconstruction, but the voice of a man.

It is not as a piece of theology for the schools, but a defence of his life and experience, of a mission carried out under pressure, opposition, and misunderstanding.

In our age, when alternative spiritualities and the re-emergence of neo-paganism once again compete for attention, Patrick’s words come to us with a particular clarity. He does not dissolve God into nature, nor reduce faith to feeling. Instead, he speaks of a living Christ—active, sovereign, and present—who acts, calls, judges, protects, and sends.

What follows, then, is not merely a historical document. It is a testimony: personal, faithful, Catholic and urgent.

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St Patrick and the Defeat of Paganism: A Saint for Our Time

On this feast day, we should look at St Patrick again – afresh.

Not as a benign symbol of cultural identity. Not as a proto-pagan mystic.

But as a Catholic missionary who confronted paganism and overcame it through the power of Christ.

And we should ask ourselves: what would he say to us now?

At a time when pagan ideas are re-emerging—often disguised as wellness, spirituality, or ecological sensitivity—Patrick’s witness is not antiquated, a facet of Dark Age history, culturally so far down stream we can just romanticise him. He has become urgently relevant.

We need his courage; his clarity; his sanctity.

And above all, we need his prayers.

The Facts

Saint Patrick was born around 385 and lived until about 460, dying at the age of roughly seventy-five. He was not Irish, but Romano-British, - early English; Celt, pre-Saxon ‘English’. And his life begins not in triumph, but in catastrophe.

As a boy, he was captured by pirates from (what we now call) England and taken to Ireland as a slave. There, in captivity, something decisive happened: he encountered Christ. In hardship and isolation, he learned to pray. He had been a formal ‘English’ Catholic, from a devoted Catholic family. Then he met Christ personally and had a vivid spiritual awakening.

After six years, he escaped and returned home. But then came the turning point—a dream. In it, he heard the call to return to Ireland.

Here we begin to see the archetypal pattern of our redemptive God -turning the evil that has overcome us into good. Patrick’s personal disaster became salvation for the Irish pagans. He freed them from the dark superstitious bondage of nature fixated paganism, and led them through conversion and baptism into the arms of Christ.

The Irish had enslaved him. He would return to free them—free them not from political bondage, but from what had enslaved them spiritually and culturally; the slavery of paganism. God took a profound evil and brought out of it a profound good.

As St Augustine of Hippo writes:

“God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to permit no evil to exist.”

A Thoroughly Catholic Saint

One of the most important things to understand about Patrick is just how Catholic he was. And why? Because the neo-pagans have tried to claim him by attributing to him a non-Catholic independent Celtic Christianity that is a figment of their neo-pagan colonialism.

His father, Calpurnius, was a Catholic deacon. His grandfather, Potitus, was a Catholic priest. He was born into a family embedded in the structures of the Catholic Church. At this time, clerical celibacy was not yet universally enforced, so such a lineage was entirely consistent and normative within the life of the Catholic Church in these islands.

There is nothing here of pagan roots or druidic continuity. Patrick comes from a thoroughly Romano-British Catholic world. The faith was already established, structured, and deeply embedded in society.

A few years ago, I was invited to do some work in Ireland and was staying with the most excellent Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan of Waterford and Lismore. I asked him about the modern claim that there existed an independent “Celtic Christianity,” somehow separate from Rome. He replied, just read Patrick’s Confessio—his own autobiographical account. It is wholly, completely and unambiguously Catholic.

I did. And he was entirely right.

The Myth of “Celtic Christianity”

Why does this matter?

Because the myth of an independent Celtic Christianity is being revived today—often by those sympathetic to a softer, more diffuse spirituality. It is attractive to imagine a form of Christianity that blends easily with nature worship, resists authority, and softens doctrinal clarity.

In this imagined narrative, Patrick becomes something like a semi-druidic shaman, a independent Celtic mystic of the landscape, detached from hierarchy and universal authority.

But this is the opposite of the truth.

Patrick was not a bridge to paganism. He was its conqueror. He rescued people from it.

He was a Catholic bishop engaged in a direct and uncompromising mission: the conversion of a pagan society to Christ.

A Return of Paganism

And this is not merely a historical question. It is a contemporary one.

Open the newspapers today.

In Canterbury—the very place where St Augustine would arrive in 597, often (mistakenly) seen as the beginning of “Catholic England”—we now see pagan practices returning.

The paganism Patrick fought is back.

At Kent County Cricket Club, based in Canterbury, they recently brought in a “faith healer” to cleanse the ground of supposed evil spirits. A report described a “holistic event” involving rune readings, tarot cards, psychic performances, and crystal healing.

The coach himself admitted:

“We got a faith healer in over the winter… or spirit healer—I’m not sure what the exact title was—but we got someone to ward off the evil spirits.”

This is incompetent terrified intuitively disastrous superstition. It is not even harmless eccentricity. It is a re-entry into precisely the worldview that Patrick confronted: fear of spirits, manipulation of unseen forces, and a turning away from the sovereignty of God. In Canterbury—the symbolic heart of English Christianity—we now see pagan practices returning: tarot, crystals, spirit-cleansing rituals.

This is not new. It is very old.

The desert fathers saw it clearly. Evagrius Ponticus warns that behind false spiritualities lie disordered powers:

“The demons do not fight against us directly, but through the thoughts they suggest.”

Paganism does not merely decorate the imagination—it reorders it, often subtly, through fear, control, and fascination with hidden forces.

For a more intellectual and frankly terrifying analysis read John Davidson’s Pagan America.

A Church Older Than We Think

Patrick also corrects another common misunderstanding—that Christianity in Britain began with Augustine in 595.

We know from the Council of Arles in 314, convened by Emperor Constantine, that there were already three British bishops present at the Council: from York, London, and likely Lincoln (often misidentified as Colchester). They signed the council’s decrees, demonstrating that the British Church was already integrated into the wider Catholic world.

This was no marginal or experimental Christianity. It was the same Church that stretched from Britain to Rome to North Africa.

As St Irenaeus insists of the Church:

“Where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church.”

After the Roman withdrawal around 410, the Church adapted to local conditions but remained in communion with Rome. As St Bede later records, it preserved learning and continuity through the so-called “Dark Ages.”

Beyond Patrick, the so-called “Celtic Church” exhibited distinct regional practices—such as monasticism centred on abbots rather than diocesan bishops, unique liturgical calendars (e.g., Easter dating controversies resolved at the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD), and a focus on asceticism—but these were variations within Catholic unity, not signs of separation.

Irish and British missionaries, like Saint Columba (c. 521–597 AD), spread Christianity to Scotland and beyond while maintaining doctrinal alignment with Rome. As detailed in works like Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731 AD), Celtic clerics participated in wider Church affairs, and divergences (e.g., tonsure styles or Easter calculations) were reconciled through synods, affirming submission to Roman norms.

In Ireland, Patrick’s mission bore extraordinary fruit. By the sixth century, Irish monasteries had become centres of orthodoxy and learning, sending scholars back into Europe—still in full allegiance to Rome.

Patrick’s Own Voice

If you want to hear St Patrick speak to you today, read him. We have this astonishing document, his autobiography, Patrick’s Confessio. No hagiography, no adoring secretary – his mouth to your ear.

He writes of the call that brought him back to Ireland:

“I saw a man coming, as it were from Ireland… and he gave me a letter… and I read the beginning of the letter: ‘The Voice of the Irish’… and as I read, I thought I heard the voice of those who were beside the wood of Foclut… crying out as with one voice: ‘We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us again.’”

He knew the danger:

“I am ready to be killed, betrayed, reduced to slavery again… I daily expect either murder or fraud or captivity.”

And yet he went.

He speaks of the fruit of his mission:

“I baptised so many thousands of people.”

His strategy was bold—he targeted the very structures of pagan society:

“The sons and daughters of Irish chiefs are seen to become monks and virgins of Christ.”

He refused patronage:

“I gave gifts to kings and their sons, but I accepted nothing from them… lest they accuse me of preaching for gain.”

And he was clear about what conversion meant:

“Those who had never had knowledge of God… who worshipped idols and unclean things… have now become the people of the Lord.”

There was no accommodation here. No syncretism. No dialogue that blurred truth.

There was conversion—from darkness to light.

A Life of Prayer

How did he love Jesus? His spiritual life was intense and disciplined:

“I used to pray many times a day… in a single day I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and almost as many at night.”

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I have just seen a photograph that stopped me in my tracks and wounded my heart.

It shows Muslims sitting on the floor inside Bristol Cathedral, eating their Ramadan Iftar meal.

For most people this will look like a gesture of hospitality — a moment of interfaith goodwill.

For me it is something else entirely.

At the entrance to this cathedral the call to prayer was sounded. You may not know what the prayer consists of? You should know.

“Allah is the greatest…
I testify there is no god but Allah…
I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah…
Come to prayer.”

Historically and culturally, the adhan functions as:

• A proclamation of Islamic faith

• A claim that a place has become a place of Muslim prayer

• A signal that an area belongs to the “realm of Islam” (dar al-Islam)

That is why historically the adhan was used to mark the establishment of Islam in a city.

Fifty years ago, in that very building, my life changed forever.

And in the photograph they are sitting almost exactly where it happened.

Halfway down the nave.
On the right-hand side.

That is where I gave my life to Christ.

Bristol Cathedral is therefore a precious place for me.

My life changed there at 8:30 on March 3rd, 1975.

It is a long time since I have spoken publicly about my evangelical conversion story, and I do not want to try the patience of my readers. But a small amount of context is necessary to explain why this photograph troubles me so deeply.

When I was eighteen I spent a year in Canada between school and university.

The most dramatic moment of that year came shortly before I returned to England. At a party in September 1973 I carelessly and irresponsibly drank nearly a litre of vodka.

I passed out. My medical friends suggest that the amount of alcohol paralysed my respiratory system. In such cases with such a quantity of alcohol, death follows.

What followed was what I can only describe as a classic near-death experience.

My soul left my body and entered a place of judgement.

The most striking feature of the experience was the presence of light — but not ordinary light. Even at eighteen I somehow knew I was encountering something different: not created light, but something behind light itself. It was ‘uncreated light.’ I had never heard the term. But that is what ‘it’ or ‘Who’ it was. It was as if light had its source there. Words strain to describe it, but the distinction felt unmistakable.

I knew I was to be judged.

The thought occurred to me that I might be sent to hell. And yet another thought immediately followed: that even if that were the outcome, it would still mean that the universe was structured around justice — that good and evil were real, the ‘universe’ knew how to tell the difference between good and evil. It didn’t matter so much as to which side of the divide my life fell, what mattered was that the universe was configured to tell the difference and that mean that Justice lay at the heart of all that had been made. and that good and evil would ultimately be separated.

If I was condemned, that would be terrible for me — but very good for all else - the universe would prove to be a safe moral place.

Very strangely, a phrase from the Book of Revelation came to mind:

“And there was silence in heaven for half an hour.” And although in the Apocalypse it describes the fight between St Michael and the rebellious angels, there was silence at this moment in my being presented there for judgement. Why? I don’t know. There just was. That’s what happened

It was exactly like that.

There was a long silence while my judgement was considered.

The Presence before me was both singular and plural at the same time. I cannot explain how I knew this. But it seemed simply obvious.

Eventually the judgement was delivered.

I was forgiven.

And I was sent back. I wasn’t told why - but

‘There were things I had to do.’

When I ‘regained consciousness’ came to myself, found that I was after all alive, just after dawn that morning, I was astonished by how I felt.

Normally getting drunk, having too much alcohol makes me really quite unwell. The quantity I had consumed should have left me deeply unwell, perhaps terminally so.

Yet five hours later I felt physically, mentally and spiritually clean — better than I had ever felt in my life.

But I did nothing with this experience.

It simply happened to me.

It was so far beyond my understanding that I had no way of integrating it into my life. It remained a memory without interpretation.

I both understood it — and did not understand it at all.

Eighteen months later everything changed.

I was in the middle of my law degree and facing a crisis I did not know how to cope with.

My live-in girlfriend suffered from severe manic depression and was repeatedly talking about ending her life. I felt completely helpless.

I had hit a brick wall.

And then a curious thought came into my mind.

Have you ever been in a desperate situation before?

Yes, I had.

And what had happened then?

‘God’ had happened to me. ‘God’ rescued me. Why had I forgotten Him? How could I have ignored Him?

I realised, almost with embarrassment, that I had forgotten Him entirely.

I needed to find Him again.

This time the stakes were life and death.

I went to the local Anglican parish church.

The service itself left me rather underwhelmed. But the vicar — a perceptive and kind man — noticed me and struck up a conversation.

When I told him my story, he mentioned that a university mission was taking place that very week.

“If you are serious,” he said, “you should go and listen to a man called David Watson speaking about God.”

The title of the mission was:

My God Is Real.

I told my girlfriend we had to go.

It felt like the only possibility of hope in what had become a very dark situation.

Walking to the Cathedral that evening felt almost like an episode from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

Every few hundred yards we ran into friends.

The first group were heading to a twenty-first birthday party.

“It’s Ginny’s 21st. You must come, -youcan’t not come - she’ll be upset.” they insisted.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to the Cathedral to hear a man talk about God.”

They looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Having failed to persuade me they left laughing, singing, boisterous and jolly.

Several hundred yards later another group appeared — musicians I knew. We all played in the university symphony orchestra together.

The Chilingirian Quartet were performing late Beethoven for free. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“Come with us,” they urged. No one interprets late Beethoven like these people do. It’s free. It’s not going to happen again.

“I’m going to the Cathedral to hear a man talk about God.”

The same conversation repeated itself twice more over the next 500 yards as I walked down Park Street.

By the fourth time I realised something strange was happening.

I had never before encountered such a series of interruptions pulling me away from one destination.

Even in my youthful naïveté I began to suspect there might be some kind of struggle going on — something connected with my soul.

Eventually we reached Bristol Cathedral.

I sat halfway down the nave on the right-hand side.

And there I listened as David Watson spoke about Jesus Christ.

He described Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

As he spoke, something extraordinary happened.

The experience I had had eighteen months earlier suddenly began to make sense.

I had encountered light.

Jesus said, “I am the light.”

I had lost my way.

Jesus said, “I am the way.”

I was searching for truth.

Jesus said, “I am the truth.”

And I had been forgiven — completely and inexplicably forgiven.

Jesus said he had came to bring the forgiveness of sins.

Only Christ claimed authority to forgive sins.

As I tried to construct a kind of photo-fit of the God I had encountered, it began to take on the face of Jesus.

Being a law student, I wondered if criteria we were used to in the law would help.

On the balance of probability, Jesus was who He said He was. ‘Beyond reasonable doubt?” I was beginning to think so.

And so, halfway down the nave of Bristol Cathedral, I surrendered my life to Him.

Which is why the photograph I saw today is so troubling.

In that photograph a group of Muslims sit on the floor of the Cathedral eating their Ramadan meal.

Almost exactly where I had knelt.

I had been persuaded that Jesus is the Son of God who died for the sins of the world.

The faith represented by those gathered in the photograph teaches that this belief is false — even blasphemous. They teach that either Jesus did not say those things and was misreported or that it was a case of self-deception on his part, or a lie.

There may not have been a burning bush, but I had met God here in the form of His Son, and he had, beginning with that night, turned my life round. He had freed me from my disorders, replaced confusion with the presence of his Holy Spirit; he had seen me through every crisis and cross roads for the fifty years since. He had never let me down, not even in the worst moments of unsupportable pain, despair and anxiety, and there have been many of those.

The Cathedral that once hosted a mission proclaiming Christ as Lord is now hosting a religious gathering that explicitly denies Jesus is Lord. They deny he is the Way truth and the life. They deny he is the Son of God, incarnate to take our human condition on himself to free us and carry us to heaven. They have taken over a building that was created to be a tabernacle for the miraculous host in the miraculous mass and claimed it for a warlord who demands surrender or death? It was once captured by Protestants who banned the mass and replaced it with a meal of remembrance - an act which denied the concept of the stones shaped around the tabernacle set on the altar; and now it had been captured again for a meal that was so much worse in concept and practice, a meal celebrating Mohammed.

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Thought Crime Comes to Britain

Well, we knew it was coming.

The United Kingdom government for some time has been trying to replicate with the help of the Islamic community a form of blasphemy law that protects both Islam and Muslims from criticism.

Today the wording was announced by the Government in preparation for the appointment of an Anti-Muslim Hostility Adviser.

It is worth testing your patience by giving the exact text so that the importance of what follows can be understood.

“Anti-Muslim hostility is intentionally engaging in, assisting, or encouraging criminal acts — including acts of violence, vandalism, harassment or intimidation — whether physical, verbal or electronically communicated — that are directed at Muslims because of their religion, or those who are perceived to be Muslim, including where that perception is based on assumptions about ethnicity, race or appearance.

It is also the prejudicial stereotyping of Muslims or people perceived to be Muslim, including because of their ethnic or racial backgrounds or their appearance, and treating them as a collective group defined by fixed and negative characteristics, with the intention of encouraging hatred against them, irrespective of their actual opinions, beliefs or actions as individuals.”

So this is now thought crime.

There has been an alliance between the far Left and Islam in European affairs for some time, and this is the latest example of it.

The Labour government depends upon Muslim voters for its majority and its remaining power, and this is the price that they are paying.

And it is, of course, the initiation of thought crime.

The History of Thought Crime

You may remember that thought crime was introduced into the political arena by the Soviet Union.

The most memorable example was Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code, under which citizens could be imprisoned for anti-Soviet agitation, counter-revolutionary thinking, or propaganda hostile to socialism.

These crimes were extremely vague, and they allowed the state to punish opinions rather than actions.

In other words, the state got its spotlight into your head and examined your thoughts — or what it believed your thoughts to be, or what it decided your thoughts were.

And so people were imprisoned merely for criticising the government, telling political jokes, or owning banned literature.

In his book 1984, George Orwell coined the term thoughtcrime. He was referring to a society in which even holding the wrong opinion becomes punishable.

He wrote memorably:

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

Orwell went further in his critique of the relationship between language, belief and state policing. In Politics and the English Language he wrote that political language is designed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

The Politics of “Phobia”

Putting the suffix “phobia” onto any non-scientific word is of course a sign that the government intends to criminalise opinion.

The great complaint about Islam has been that it is perfectly reasonable for people to have a fear — or a phobia — about Islam.

Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Robert Spencer, a historian of Islam, has kept a database which tracks jihadist attacks globally.

Since that date the database claims that there have been over 50,000 jihadist attacks worldwide, in which at least 300,000 people have been killed.

Spencer, in his historical work, also points out that Islam was spread by the edge of the sword in the seventh and eighth centuries, conquering Byzantine Syria, Egypt, Persia, North Africa and Spain, giving people a choice between conversion, subordinate status, or death.

Policy Exchange did a survey of Muslims in Britain to discover what percentage were i

n favour of introducing aspects of Sharia law in the UK. The answer was 40%. That might cause you a little twinge of ‘phobia’ as you consider that would or could mean for our society.

The End of the Freedom to Criticise Ideas

It has long been a feature of our society that we have been free to criticise ideas.

This is an essential part of our culture, and the only means by which we can preserve any kind of personal integrity and the search for truth and reality.

But the introduction by the government of what is effectively a new blasphemy law changes our culture radically, and removes from us one of the most precious and essential aspects of our freedoms.

As it happens, we already have laws which outlaw active hatred and discrimination.

And they apply to everybody.

The immediate problem with this particular change is that in a society where the growing elements of control against all of us have been based on a relativistic egalitarianism, all of a sudden one faith above all the others is singled out for protection.

This is contradictory, inconsistent, unreasonable and unfair — and of course dangerous.

A Warning from Andrew Gilligan

Andrew Gilligan, writing in The Spectator, comments helpfully:

“The Conservative government did adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. But that text explicitly uses language close to that of Britain’s existing hate-crime laws, which apply equally to all faiths. It was agreed in national discussions over many years, rather than cooked up by a private working group after Labour panicked about losing Muslim votes. And of course it has done nothing to stem the rise in antisemitism.”

He goes on to warn:

“The Islamist groups who campaigned for the definition, with an explicit agenda of suppressing criticism of themselves, haven’t got all they wanted yet. But they are the winners here. The announcement explicitly says the definition ‘may need to evolve over time’.”

The Legal Challenge

The Free Speech Union have courageously and helpfully promised that they are going to challenge this in the courts.

The judicial review against the government that they intend to bring will claim that the decision is unlawful because the government had not sufficient lawful authority to impose such a definition through guidance rather than through legislation.

They argue that the definition itself is incoherent and risks censorship.

It is poorly constructed and contradictory, which it really is.

One of the serious flaws in the wording is that it allows officials to label behaviour as “hostility”, which critics say could easily be extended to legitimate criticism of Islam.

You can see, without any encouragement from me, that writing this article itself — criticising the government for singling out Islam for special protection — would constitute hostility in this climate.

The Free Speech Union points out, with common sense, that this is the back door to a blasphemy law.

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We no longer know how to speak about the soul

One of the more serious losses in modern language is that it has become increasingly difficult to speak about the soul at all.

We speak instead of the self, the ego, identity, psychology, therapy, trauma, personality, self-expression, emotional regulation, and rationality. Some of that language is legitimate. Some of it is useful. But it comes with a hidden cost. It encourages us to think that once we have described consciousness, memory, emotion, desire, anxiety, and self-perception, we have accounted for the whole person.

But-

the Christian tradition insists that there is something deeper in man than the surface traffic of the mind. Deeper than appetite. Deeper than fantasy. Deeper than anxiety. Deeper than the social performance by which we continually present ourselves to others and to ourselves. It insists that there is a soul.

And one of the tasks of Lent may present itself to us as: to recover not only the language with which to speak about the soul, but the inward quiet in which its existence may become perceptible again.

The problem is not only sin. It is interior noise

The Fathers do not usually speak in the modern language of ego. Their distinction is not between soul and ego in a Freudian sense. It is at once older and more exact.

They speak of the inner man and the outer man.

They speak of the soul and the passions.

They speak of the heart and distraction.

Instead of the mind as the engine of rationality, they speak of the nous and the swarm of wandering thoughts.

They chart our disorder. What they describe is a human being who has become inwardly scattered. Not merely sinful in the abstract, but dispersed; pulled apart; drawn outward into desires, anxieties, ambitions, irritations, fantasies, and appetites until he begins to live almost entirely on the surface of himself.

That is one of the spiritual conditions of modernity. We are not just busy. We are what one might call distributed. Diffused among impressions. Thinly spread across reactions. So accustomed to surface that we begin to forget there is any depth beneath it.

But the Christian tradition can help us re-discover it.

St Paul and the lost inward man

St Paul gives us one of the great coordinates for thinking about this at all. He offers this explosive and astonishing insight and description:

“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.”
2 Corinthians 5:17

In 2 Corinthians 4:16 he writes:

“Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.”

That distinction helps us grasp the shift of balance and energy from the body to the soul. The outward man is the man of action, reaction, role, fatigue, assertion, and expenditure. He is the man who spends himself upon the world.

But the inward man is the one who stands before God and tries to pray.

If that distinction is lost, Christian anthropology begins to collapse into secular psychology. The faith no longer addresses the person in his depth, but only in his moods, his habits, and his self-description.

Augustine and the scattered self

No one understood this more penetratingly than Augustine.

He saw that the human being becomes scattered among created things. Drawn outward. Fragmented by lower loves. Dispersed among fascinations. Restless because not gathered.

In the Confessions he addresses God with a line of extraordinary force:

“You gathered me together from the state of disintegration in which I had been fruitlessly divided.”

And then, even more sharply:

“I turned from unity in you to be lost in multiplicity.”

That is almost a diagnosis of modern life.

We are not only sinful. We are dissipated. Distributed. Broken into fragments by endless outwardness.

The soul is not created by introspection. Still less by self-obsession. It becomes perceptible when the fragmented self is recollected before God.

What we call the self is often simply the soul in a condition of disarray.

Why modern therapeutic language is not enough

This is why the language of therapy, though often useful within its proper limits, is finally inadequate as an account of the human person.

It tells us to manage the self, protect the self, interpret the self, express the self, validate the self, heal the self. There is a place for some of this.

But the problem with modern therapeutic language is that it is always directed towards idolatry.

Carl Jung succeeded in displacing our Creator, Saviour, our God, with the Self.

And so everything about the development of our inner potential is put in terms of:

managing the self
protecting the self
interpreting the self
expressing the self
validating the self
healing the self

It’s not that we don’t need managing, protecting, interpreting, expressing, validating and healing.

But it is a question of what part of us is the focus of our attention?

If it is the soul, this becomes salvation, and all these tasks get addressed as part of the journey in repentance and re-creation in the image of Christ; the theosis the Fathers direct us to.

Otherwise the self becomes idolatry.

But Christianity asks a harder question.

What if the self itself, at least as ordinarily experienced, is not the deepest truth of who we are?

What if much of what we habitually call ourselves is in fact a turbulence of reaction, fantasy, fear, vanity, appetite, memory, and self-dramatisation?

The Fathers would not deny personality. But they would insist that the person is deeper than the psychological weather passing across consciousness.

Evagrius and the discovery that thoughts are not the soul

This is where Evagrius Ponticus becomes immensely useful.

Evagrius is one of the great diagnosticians of the inner life because he distinguishes the soul from the endless movement of thoughts. His account of the logismoi — thoughts, fantasies, promptings, anxieties, resentments, recurring inner narratives — is astonishingly exact. He writes:

“Whether these thoughts are able to disturb the soul or not is not up to us; but whether they linger or not, and whether they arouse passions or not; that is up to us.”

That is an extraordinarily important distinction.

A thought may arrive. It may intrude. It may disturb. It may harass. But it is not yet identical with the deepest truth of the person.

We moderns too easily assume that because something is in our heads, it is ourselves.

Evagrius relocates the temptation and distraction. He absolves us from the thought and locates it as a demonic disturbance and interference; something that is planted - not home grown.

The moments before sleep tell the truth about us

This is one reason the moments before sleep are spiritually so revealing.

As the will begins to relax its grip upon the world, and practical action ceases, and the social self starts to loosen, something striking happens. The managerial, daylight self weakens.

But peace does not always appear.

What often emerges first is disorder.

Unfinished conversations return. Irritations replay themselves. Ambitions murmur. Fantasies reassert themselves. Old regrets rise up. Anxiety becomes diffuse. Mortality makes itself dimly felt.

The Desert Fathers would have recognised this immediately.

Silence does not first reveal peace. It reveals what noise has been concealing.

The Desert Fathers and the exposure of interior disorder

That is one of the great strengths of the desert tradition. It is unsentimental.

Our lying down to rest in preparation for sleep exposes us to our selves.

The withdrawal of outward distraction permits inward agitation to become audible. What had been masked by activity is now heard more clearly. We discover that much of what we call the self is not freedom at all, but compulsion. Not depth, but turbulence.

And yet this is precisely why the interval before sleep can become spiritually fruitful.

Because when the theatre of action is closing, when social performance is over, when one can do almost nothing but surrender to the coming night, one may begin to notice that beneath the agitation there remains something deeper, less theatrical, less reactive, less fabricated.

One may begin, however faintly, to notice beyond the mind, the soul.

The threshold of sleep as a school of prayer

This is why the Church gives us Compline. Compline is not merely a practical office before bed; it is a theological act. It assumes that the Christian should not drift casually from activity into unconsciousness. He should first examine himself, repent, commend his soul to God, place himself under mercy, and accept the night as a form of surrender.

Sleep becomes a kind of daily rehearsal of death: a relinquishing of control, a withdrawal from the world, a confession of creatureliness.

The night prayer of the Church is built around the recognition that the soul is real, vulnerable, accountable, and finally held not by its own strength but by the mercy of God.

To say this is not to sentimentalise sleep. Sleepiness is not mysticism. The person can be merely tired, and tiredness often has no spiritual content at all. But, it is a moment of abandonment, as precondition for being drawn into the life of the Spirit.

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