The word from Clonmacnoise

The Archbishop of Armagh, the Most Reverend Alan Harper, preached at Clonmacnoise on the Feast Day of St Mary Magdalene 2007:

I have somewhat to say on the present madness of the Anglican Communion and the Christian quest to appropriate and to live the life of resurrection. All here.

He identified two 'boulders' to the resurrection life: bibliolatry and division and disunity in the Church.

While both are undoubtedly boulders the first is historically specific; the second is endemic.

He regards as simplistic the notion the thesis that unity may be sought at the cost of truth, arguing that no single group can hold all truth while division actively discourages us from seeing the mote in our own eye.

It is not then the case that unity is maintained at the expense of truth, but rather that disunity guarantees that access to a fuller knowledge of the truth is consciously inhibited.

I might want to ask he understands truth and our perception of it, and also how truth is apprehended if our disunity and division are not ephemeral to Christian faith but inherent and integral to it.

On his observation of the Covenant, however, I am with him all the way (emphasis added):

Archbishop Drexel Gomez, addressing the General Synod of the Church of England on the issue of an Anglican Covenant, [full speech here] said recently:

Anglican leaders are seriously wondering whether they can recognize in each other the faithfulness to Christ that is the cornerstone of our common life and cooperation. While some feel there will be inevitable separation, others are trying to deny that there is a crisis at all. That is hardly a meeting of minds. Unless we can make a fresh statement clearly and basically of what holds us together we are destined to grow apart.

I doubt if anyone believes that there is no crisis. Rather, in the context of Archbishop Drexel’s key test, that is, recognizing in each other the faithfulness to Christ that is the cornerstone of our common life and cooperation, a spirit of arrogance on both sides is causing people of genuine faith and undoubted love for the Lord Jesus to bypass the requirement for patience and for making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

I have yet to meet any “leader” who does not treat with the utmost respect and indeed reverence the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament. I have heard no one in this crisis deny the fundamental tenets of the faith as Anglicans have received them. Yet I have heard believing Christians attack other Christians for not believing precisely as they themselves believe. Equally, I have heard believing Christians attack other Christians for not attaching the weight they themselves attach to this biblical text compared with that.

This is not the way of Christ; it is the way of fallen humanity. It is a boulder of our own creation and I do not know who will help us to roll it away.

Some fear, and I am among them, that an Anglican Covenant, unless it is open and generous and broad, may simply become a further means of obstruction: a boulder, rather than a lever to remove what obscures and impedes our access to the truth that sets us free.

Harvest of Sorrow

Robert Conquest The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (Pimlico, 2002; first published 1986).

Published before the fall of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union this study has (according to its 2002 Preface) been vindicated by subsequent access to the archives.

This is an excellent study. Conquest travels steadily and carefully through the available evidence to calculate numbers killed in the dekulakization and engineered famine (1930-1933) in the Ukraine and North Caucasus in particular. He arrives at a conservative estimate of 12 million killed in an act of genocide.

Conquest's style is somewhat stolid. But he is no blinkered accountant of death. He (unfashionably) quotes Schiller (p. 322): 'World History is the World's Court of Judgement' (his capitals) as he lays responsibility for this mass murder at the door of Stalin and those who carried out Stalin's wishes.

He also examines the role of the West - where accurate eye-witness information was available - and the ability of the Soviets to deny, dissemble and obfuscate and thus to avoid calumny. In the end, too many in the West heard what they wanted to believe:

"The scandal is not that they [intellectuals in the West] justified the Soviet actions, but that they refused to hear about them, that they were not prepared to face the evidence." (p.321)

Conquest records acts of compassion that were uttely futile in the face of this tragedy - small attempts to rescue a child, or to give someone food for the day, often only revealed because the benefactor was caught and punished. Yet somehow these indications of the capacity for altruism seem so important simply because of the magnitude of evil all around.

And he has a chapter on children - starved, killed, turned into beggars, left to die, even eaten, and, sometimes, turned into the next generation of NKVD interrogators and torturers.

It is this destruction of the human soul of the living that Conquest finds to be the worst tragedy: the dehumanisation of those who implemented policies of mass murder, the capacity to kill in the name of historical necessity and the party, the punishment of small acts of kindness.

Nothing has since stopped mass murder. Torture is not uncommon. I guess there is only one lesson, if that's the right word: the only judges are historians, by which time its too late.