What Do We Want?

This is the commencing chant at all good protests. 'What do we want?'  'Full grants.'   'When do we want them?'   'Now.' Those particular details are of course extracted from a favourite demo of my youth, but you get my drift. That particular demo did as much good as a chocolate teapot by the way, but it was better than being in the library - the location of which I never did establish with any certainty.

All of which brings me nicely and a little mystified to the encampment at St Paul's Cathedral. Mystified because the campers lack a pithy message and I find myself unusually reluctant to lambast them. The message seems to be, 'What do we want?'   'Well a variety of vaguely impractical things actually.'   'When do we want them?'   'At some time in the future we would imagine but can we stay here and be on the tele for a while please.'

The major damage achieved by the demonstrators has been to the Church of England which has managed to look even less effectual than usual, quite an achievement in fact. But even here I find myself less entrenched than usual. What precisely could our established church have done other than agonise and vacillate as it has done? Sent in the bailiffs? Admirably decisive but possibly unchristian. Bring them in off the streets and take the lead against capitalism? Definitely decisive, decidedly unchristian, at least as practised by your average anglican. No, my major criticism of the Cof E remains that so few of its ministers actually give off an air of actually believing in God. Oh and Rowan Williams should get a haircut. You wouldn't get a pope looking like that.

Monsignor Fallon

Which brings me to something I should have written a while ago. Monsignor Tom Fallon died earlier this year. He conducted our wedding ceremony. He took my first confession. He officiated at my first communion. He radiated benevolent godliness and I, like thousands of others, viewed him as my priest. They were busing them in from London for his arrival into the church in Hockley. A great and a nice man. Requiescat in pace.

As it happens I did once ask Monsignor about camels and eyes of needles- his answer centred on the need for humility before God and man. What would he have made of the St Paul's protest? He would have sympathised with the protesters and ministered to them. As for the rich bankers working in the City - he would have sympathised with and ministered to them. This strength can easily be mistaken for ambivalence. It is not. In the hands of great men, such neutrality itself is greatness.