Still here!

Silly me. At the time of writing der Vater is still in Britain, having completed his State Visit thing and now gone to Birmingham to beatify John Henry Newman, local boy made good.

I have always been mildly curious about Newman, without having done any particular research about him, and so I was surprised to read this in the Financial Times.

The thrust of the article (and it is worth reading in full) is that McRatzinger was a Newmanite until the late '60s when he was lecturing in Tubingen and a number of protesters broke in, disrupting his lesson. From then on he went away from Newman's teaching and became more authoritarian. Newman, you see, had taught that the plurality of the church, ie most catholics, should believe something for it to be accepted as dogma. Translated into contraception (almost certainly) and abortion (possibly) this might make for dogma which the Pope, and his predecessor, and almost all the Popes before that, disagreed. So why is he beatifying him?

Interesting stuff.