Archbishop Dolan Confirmed as Visitor for Irish Seminaries

As predicted here last week, the Vatican today confirmed that Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York will be heading the Apostolic Visitation into Ireland's two pontifical seminaries.

I'm hearing of some unpleasant and seriously flawed practices going on in the Pontifical Irish College in Rome, but am waiting to see if these can be substantiated.

No doubt all these issues will be fully addressed by Archbishop Dolan once he starts the investigation.

Cardinal Sandoval to be Papal Delegate to the Legion?

The news agency APCOM is reporting that Mexican Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iniguez is tipped to be the "papal delegate" to the Legionaries of Christ.

The Archbishop of Guadalajara, 77, had a recent private audience with the Holy Father and is expected to be appointed before the Vatican's summer recess. The news agency notes he is close to retirement and therefore will have the time to undertake such a position, but it says other candidates may be chosen instead.

The delegate's duty would be to oversee what is likely to be a long process of restructuring of the religious congregation, redefining its charism, reviewing its exercise of authority, raising its mission, and investigating its management of finances.

The current leadership will be answerable to their new superior.

The final decisions will be left to Pope Benedict.

UAE Sends First Envoy to the Holy See

Pope Benedict XVI welcomed today the first ever ambassador to the Holy See sent by the United Arab Emirates, Mrs Hissa Abdulla Ahmed Al-Otaiba.

What makes this news particularly interesting is that it demonstrates the increasing influence Catholics are gaining on the Arab peninsular through the huge intake of foreign labourers, many of whom come from the Indian sub-continent.

As I wrote in 2008 soon after visiting Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the changing patterns of belief in the Gulf are good news for the Church and for the region as a whole. The tragedy is the appalling treatment Christians and other immigrants often experience in the workplace, and the severe lack of churches for so many of the faithful.

The Pope gently addressed the first concern, saying:

"It is towards men and women, understood as unique in their God-given nature, that all politics, culture, technology and development are directed. To reduce the aims of these human endeavours merely to profit or expediency would be to risk missing the centrality of the human person in his or her integrity as the primary good to be safeguarded and valued, for man is the source, the focus and the aim of all economic and social life (cf. Caritas in Veritate, 25). Thus, the Holy See and the Catholic Church take care to highlight the dignity of man in order to maintain a clear and authentic vision of humanity on the international stage and in order to muster new energy in the service of what is best for the development of peoples and nations."

He then commended the UAE for the churches that have been built so far.

I would have liked the Holy Father to have been a little more direct on these issues, but at least some of these concerns were addressed.

Given the current situation over there, and advances in Catholic-Muslim dialogue, a papal visit to the Arab peninsular may well not be that far off.

Archbishop Dolan to Lead Apostolic Visitation?

I'm hearing that Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York will be heading the Apostolic Visitation into Ireland's two Pontifical Colleges in Rome and Maynooth.

Whether that means he'll be heading the whole visitation is not yet known.

Archbishop Dolan is to give a talk in Maynooth on May 27th, so perhaps an announcement will be made then.

Spain's Secularist PM to Visit Pope

Spain’s Prime Minister is to visit Pope Benedict XVI in June, according to the Barcelona Reporter.

It says Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega confirmed that Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero will visit, but said it only taking place because it conforms to protocol. Spain has presidency of the EU and it is common for European political leaders to visit the Pope.

Spain's government is very secular and has had frequent run-ins with the Church since elected in 2004.

The Holy Father travels to Spain in November, and will visit the cities of Santiago de Compostela and Barcelona.

Video Preview of Benedict XVI's September Visit

Here's a stirring video looking ahead to the Holy Father's visit to Britain in September (H/T Hermeneutic of Continuity blog). Not sure who made it, but quite a lot of footage comes from The Papacy of Reason, a documentary I made with Raphaela Schmid on Benedict XVI back in 2008.

Cardinal Sodano on the Ropes

I tend to agree with Joseph Bottum on this, at least that Cardinal Sodano should come clean, as I wrote here.
From First Things

The Cost of Father Maciel
May 12, 2010
Joseph Bottum

A special preview from the new issue of First Things: In this month’s Public Square, Joseph Bottum evaluates the damage of the scandals of the Legion of Christ.

Cardinal Sodano has to go. The dean of the College of Cardinals, he has been found too often on the edges of scandal. Never quite charged, never quite blamed, he has had his name in too long a series of depositions and court records and news accounts—an ongoing embarrassment to the Church he serves. The Vatican has been responding in a disorganized way to the frenzy of recent press stories about often thirty-year-old abuse cases. What it should do is put its own house in order, moving out the unhelpful remnants of the bureaucracy that allowed those scandals to fester for so long.

The latest revelations concern the financial benefits Cardinal Sodano received from Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the corrupt conman who founded the Legion of Christ and its associated lay group, Regnum Christi. And those revelations follow hard on the 2008 convictions of Raffaello Follieri for wire fraud and money laundering. (Follieri’s company, you’ll remember, was trading in decommissioned church property, and it relied for its crimes on the prestige of having Cardinal Sodano’s nephew as its vice president.) That news, in turn, followed the cardinal’s reported role in thwarting a 1995 investigation into the subsequently proved accusations against the episcopal molester in Vienna, Hans Hermann Groër.

In one sense, of course, it’s very sad. A long career in the Church is not ending well, and it would be kinder to protect the man and let him slip away unnoticed. But Cardinal Sodano himself seems unwilling to let it be so. Speaking of the stories that were on the front page of nearly every newspaper in the world, he told the pope publicly at Easter this year, “The people of God are with you and do not allow themselves to be impressed by the petty gossip of the moment.”

Petty gossip? There’s room for complaint about the way the scandals have been used to advance every agenda under the sun, but when the subject is abused and sodomized children, petty is not the adjective of choice. Even in a season of mismanaged Vatican responses to the frenzy of the press, Sodano’s line was stunningly tone-deaf, and it served mostly to give the media yet another day of headlines. As things stand, if (God forbid) Pope Benedict were to die, the obsequies would be led by Cardinal Sodano—and the newscasts, hour after hour, would feature rehashes of all that is now associated with his name.

But that’s not the real problem. The deeper point is the lack of consequences—visible consequences—for failures and missteps and wrong associations in the Vatican. The real problem is that heads haven’t rolled, penalties haven’t been exacted, for Fr. Maciel’s deceptions.

For many years, Cardinal Sodano received money and benefits for his projects from the Legion of Christ, and in 1998 he halted investigations into sexual abuse by the Legion’s founder. That apparent quid pro quo ought to have a price.

It ought to have a price precisely because the scandal of Fr. Maciel is so deadly. The child-abuse cases were a corruption in the Church. What Fr. Maciel attempted is a corruption of the Church. He fooled many people, including this magazine’s creator, Richard John Neuhaus, who once defended Maciel in a 2002 column, before agreeing later that Cardinal Ratzinger (investigating Maciel at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) and John Paul ”know more than I know with respect to evidence.”

The irony is that Fr. Neuhaus didn’t undertake that defense at the behest of Maciel, whom he never knew well. He did so because people he did know well, young American priests of the Legion, begged him to do so, telling him that their founder was suffering an attack they were certain was false and unfair. The first victims are the men, women, and children that Maciel, in his polymorphous perversity, used sexually, but the second set of victims are the good, strong, dynamic priests who had little direct contact with the man and are nonetheless tarred by his actions.

In the long history of the Church, enduring religious establishments have been built by the sinful, but usually the new order’s spirituality is a correction to the sinfulness: a way, a charism, that leads such sinners to Christ. Maciel, however, wrote his sins, and his power to cover up those sins, deep into the spirituality of the Legion of Christ—in how it handles confession, how it treats obedience, and how it understands authority.

The bishops who undertook the apostolic visitation of the Legion have finished their work, presenting their report to the Vatican on April 30. In anticipation, the directors of the Legion issued a statement on March 26, which read, “We ask all those who accused him in the past to forgive us, those whom we did not believe or were incapable of giving a hearing to, since at the time we could not imagine that such behavior took place.” On April 25, Fr. Owen Kearns, publisher of the Legion’s newspaper, the National Catholic Register, added, “To Father Maciel’s victims, I pray you can accept these words: I’m sorry for what our founder did to you. I’m sorry for adding to your burden with my own defense of him and my accusations against you. I’m sorry for being unable to believe you earlier. I’m sorry this apology has taken so long.”

All that is good, and yet, it isn’t enough. First Things has never received money from the Legion (and the closest I personally have been to their finances was a single review, of an Orhan Pamuk novel, I wrote for the National Catholic Register back in 1997). But then one thinks of the likes of Thomas Williams, Tom Hoopes, Thomas Berg, and all the other friends and acquaintances who had associations with the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi. For that matter, many American Catholic commentators have lectured over the years at the movement’s events. The money they received was never significant, but it all helped contribute to an atmosphere in which the Legion could close ranks after the first public accusations against Maciel.

That atmosphere has to be eliminated, which will require the rewriting and reordering not just of the institutional structure but also of the spiritual design of the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi.

In April, the National Catholic Reporter published a two-part article about Maciel’s financial dealings. Given the obsession with all things Catholic this spring, a time when the Long Lent of 2002 seemed to have come around again, the article received surprisingly little attention. Perhaps that’s because the author, Jason Berry, didn’t quite have the story he wanted. His account of cash in Rome was thinly sourced, and his reporting on Maciel’s ac-tions in Mexico didn’t find the smoking gun we’ve all long expected to be found—the one that shows the Legion’s connections to the likes of Carlos Slim, whose telephone monopoly and political string-pulling made him the world’s richest man, and to the endemic corruption of Mexican poli-tics.

As I wrote when the articles first appeared, although they were fumbling as jour-nalism, they were fumbling toward what seems to be the truth. A larger part of the reason that the mainstream media didn’t latch on to the story may be that it does not fit the narrative of the mo-ment—for Joseph Ratzinger, first as cardinal and now as pope, comes off in the Maciel scandal as something like the hero. Not until the end did John Paul II see more than a charismatic Latin American figure, raising money and training vibrant, active priests. Cardinal Ratzinger clearly saw deeper, despite the powerful protection Cardinal Sodano cast over Maciel.

The received journalistic narrative skewed a great deal of other reporting this spring. All through March and April, Der Spiegel, the New York Times, and the Irish Times—to name only a few—were working, quite accurately, within the media’s standard picture, which demands that the pope himself must have been involved in covering up crimes in the Church.

A more accurate understanding, as I wrote in a recent Weekly Standard article, would see that the first part of the scandals—the most evil, disgusting part—is basically over. For a variety of reasons, Catholics suffered through a corruption of their priests, cen-tered around 1975, with the clergy’s percentage of sexual predators reaching new and vile levels. The Church now has in place stringent child-protection procedures, and the cases now being discussed, real and imagined, are more than a decade old.

The second part of the scandals, however, involves not the mostly dead criminals but the living institution. The bishops who ruled over those corrupt priests catastrophically failed to act. There were never a lot of these Catholic cases, but there were plenty enough—with every single one a horror, both in the act itself and in the failure of the bishops to react. The Catholic Church did not start the worldwide epidemic of child sexual abuse, and it did not materially advance it. But the bureaucracy of the Church did not do nearly enough to fight that epidemic when it broke out among its own clergy. And for these failures, every Catholic is paying—in nearly $3 billion of donations lost in court judgments, in suspicion of pastors, and in deep shame.

Insofar as anyone comes out well from all this, it is Pope Benedict. However much the narrative demands that he be pulled in, nothing yet published has held up to serious scrutiny. Which ought not, really, to be a surprise. This man was the one who actually saw there was a problem—the one who, in 2005, openly denounced the “filth in the Church and in the priesthood.” A Maltese abuse victim who met the pope this April told an interviewer, “I did not have any faith in priests. Now, after this moving experience, I have hope again. You people in Italy have a saint. Do you realize that? You have a saint!”

Not that the Vatican has managed to tell this story. The responses of the bureaucracy in Rome have swung between unhelpful silences and wrong-headed whines. There may be good reasons not to play the publicity games—driven by media cycles and celebrity culture and dramas of shame and fame—in which the world is caught up these days. The wheels of Catholicism have always ground slowly, operating with a deliberation that will not, and should not, match the world’s hectic pace. Then again, there may be good reasons for the Church to take the world as it finds it, trying to move people toward Christ from where those people actually are.

But, over these recent months of frenzy, the Vatican has unsuccess-fully adopted both these modes. The bureaucracy has attempted public relations and done it badly. And the bureaucracy has attempted interior review, for the edification of its people and the good discipline of its priests, and that, too, has not been done particularly well. The faithful are saddened, responding to the news accounts with a sigh and mumble, and the clergy are disheartened and con-fused.

For either purpose, a figure such as Cardinal Sodano has to be removed from his current position and told to serve the Church in prayer. Everyone inside the Church needs to be taught that there are consequences for scandalous mistakes. And, for the outside world, Ca-tholicism needs a story to tell, a narrative that can convey the simple truth: Despite the sins of its members, the Church remains what it has been—a light in dark places, a force of charity for the weak and the poor, and a hope for humankind on its way to the saving truth that is God.

Joseph Bottum is editor of First Things.

Pope's In-Flight Briefing with Journalists

Below is the full transcript of Pope Benedict XVI's briefing with journalists on the papal plane to Portugal this morning, courtesy of Vatican Radio:

Q. - What message will you bring to Portugal, a deeply Catholic country in the past and a bearer of faith in the secular world of today. How can the faith be announced in a context which is indifferent, and sometimes hostile, to the Church?

First of all, good morning to all of you. I hope we will all have a good trip, despite the famous ash cloud which we are above right now.

In terms of Portugal, first of all I have feelings of joy and gratitude for everything this country has done and is doing in the world and in history, the deep humanity of this people which I have come to know through a past visit and so many Portuguese friends. I would say it is true that Portugal has been a great force for the Catholic faith, and it has carried that faith to every part of the world. A courageous, intelligent, creative faith, it has known how to create great cultures, we see this in Brazil, in Portugal itself, but also the presence of the Portuguese spirit in Africa and Asia.

On the other hand, this presence of secularism is not entirely new. The dialectic between secularism and faith has a long history in Portugal. By the seventeenth century, there was already a strong current of the Enlightenment. We need only think of names such as Pombal. In these centuries, Portugal lived this dialectic which today naturally has been radicalized and is reflected in all of the signs of the current European spirit. This seems to me a challenge, but also a great possibility. In these centuries, the dialectic between the Enlightenment, secularism and faith always had people who wanted to build bridges and to create a dialogue. Unfortunately, the dominant tendency was to see a contradiction and to see one as excluding the other. Today we can see this is false. We have to find a synthesis and be able to dialogue. In the multi-cultural situation we’re all in, it’s clear that a European culture which aims to be solely rationalist, without any sense of the transcendent dimension, would not be in a position to dialogue with the other great cultures of humanity – all of which have this sense of the transcendent dimension, which is a dimension of the human person. To think that there’s a pure reason, even a historic reason, which exists entirely in itself, is an error, and we are discovering this more and more. It touches only a part of the human person expressed in a given historic situation, and is not reason as such. Reason as such is open to transcendence, and only in the meeting between transcendent reality, faith and history is human life fully realized.

I think the mission of Europe in this situation is to find a path to this dialogue, to integrate faith, rationality, and modernity in a single anthropological vision of the concrete human person and render that vision for the future of humanity.

For that reason, I think the task and mission of Europe in this situation is to find this dialogue, to integrate faith and reason in a single modern anthropological vision of the concrete human person and thus also render it communicable to other human cultures. So I would say that the presence of secularism is a normal thing, but the separation, the opposition between faith and secularism is anomalous. The great challenge of this moment is that the two meet, so they may find their true identity. It is a mission for Europe and a human necessity in our time.

Q: - Thank you, Holy Father. Continuing on the theme of Europe, the economic crisis has recently gotten a lot worse in Europe, especially in Portugal. Some European leaders think the future of the European Union is at risk. What lessons should we learn from this crisis, including at the ethical and moral level? What are the keys for consolidating the unity and cooperation of the European nations in the future?

I would say that this economic crisis, with its undeniable moral component, is a case of applying and making concrete what I said earlier, that is of two separate cultural currents meeting, otherwise we will not find a path to the future. Here, too, I believe there is a false dualism. There is an economic positivism that thinks it is possible to realize itself without an ethical component, a market that regulates itself according to its own economic strength, by a positivistic and pragmatic reasoning of the economy. Ethics is something different, something extraneous. In reality, we can see today that a pure economic pragmatism which ignores the reality of the human person, who is inherently ethical, has no positive ending, but creates irresolvable problems. This is the moment to recognize that ethics is not something exterior, but rather interior to all forms of rationality, including economic reason.

On the other hand, we also have to confess the Catholic-Christian faith often has been overly individualistic. It left the concrete things of the economy to the world, thinking only of individual salvation and its religious aspects, without recognizing that these imply a global responsibility and a responsibility for the world. So here too we must enter into a concrete dialogue. I tried to do as much in my encyclical Caritas in veritate, and the whole tradition of the social teaching of the church moves in this sense, broadening the ethical aspect of the faith from the individual to a responsibility for the world, to a reason that is perforated by ethics. On the other hand the most recent events on the markets, in the last two or three years, have amply shown us that the ethical dimension is an internal one and that it must enter into economic action, because man is an one. A healthy anthropology that takes everything into account. Only in this way will we solve the problem. Only in this way will Europe deliver and succeed in its mission.

Q: Thank you. Now we come to Fatima, which will be the spiritual culmination of this trip. Holy Father, what meaning do the apparitions of Fatima have for us today? When you presented the Third Secret of Fatima in a press conference at the Vatican Press Office in June 2000, many of us and other colleagues asked if the message of the secret could be extended, beyond the assassination attempt against John Paul II to other sufferings of the popes. Could the context of that vision also be extended to the suffering of the church today,for the sins of the sexual abuse of minors?

First of all, I want to express my joy to go to Fatima, to pray before Our Lady of Fatima, and to experience the presence of the faith there, where from the little ones a new force of the faith was born, and which is not limited to the little ones, but has a message for the whole world and all epochs of history, and touches history in its present and illuminates this history. In 2000, during the presentation, I said there is a supernatural impulse which does not come from the individual imagination but from the reality of the Virgin Mary, from the supernatural, that impulse which enters into a subject, and is expressed according to the possibilities of the subject.

The subject is determined by his or her historic, personal, temperamental, situation. Therefore, supernatural impulse is translated according to the subject’s possibilities to see, imagine or express it. But in these expressions, formed by the subject, a content is hidden, that goes beyond, goes deeper. Only in the passage of time is the true depth, that was clothed in this vision, revealed to us, only then is it possible for concrete people.

Here too, beyond this great vision of the suffering Pope, which we can initially circumscribe to John Paul II, other realities are indicated which over time will develop and become clear. Thus it is true that beyond the moment indicated in the vision, one speaks about and sees the necessity of suffering by the Church, which is focused on the person of the Pope, but the Pope stands for the church, and therefore sufferings of the Church are announced. The Lord told us that the Church will always be suffering in various ways, up to the end of the world. The important point is that the message, the answer of Fatima, it not substantially addressed to particular devotions, but is the fundamental response: permanent conversion, penance, prayer, and the three cardinal virtues: faith, hope and charity. Here we see the true, fundamental response the Church must give, which each of us individually must give, in this situation.

In terms of what we today can discover in this message, attacks against the Pope or the Church do not only come from outside; rather the sufferings of the Church come from within, from the sins that exist in the Church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way: the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies on the outside, but is born from the sin within the church, the Church therefore has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the need for justice. Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. In one word we have to re-learn these essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues. That is how we respond, and we need to be realistic in expecting that evil will always attack, from within and from outside, but the forces of good are also always present, and finally the Lord is stronger than evil and the Virgin Mary is for us the visible maternal guarantee that the will of God is always the last word in history.

Looking Ahead to Pope's Trip to Portugal

John Allen has a good pre-analysis of the Pope's visit to Fatima next week.

Portugal is becoming steadily more secular and recently passed a same-sex marriage bill, subject to a presidential veto, so this visit was always going to address the problems of secularism in Europe. But recent events in the European economy will give it added weight and relevance.

Like John Paul II, Benedict XVI has consistently argued that Europe must rediscover its Christian roots and that the continent cannot be bound by financial ties alone.

The Pope is scheduled to leave for Fatima on Tuesday but the volcanic cloud, currently passing over Portugal, Spain and Italy, may cause problems.

"Couples Who Use Natural Family Planning Almost Never Divorce"

Dr. Janet Smith always has a knack of putting across the Church's teaching on important life and reproductive issues in ways you'll never hear the mainstream media, or even some Church circles.

A professor at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, here's what she says in response to a poor piece by AFP news agency on the Church's teaching on contraception.

Noting that more than one out of three babies in the United States are born to a single mother, one out of four pregnancies are aborted and that more than one out of two marriages end in divorce, she says:

“If people were living by the Church's teaching on sexuality, those things wouldn't be happening, and those things are a path to misery."

“People born out of wedlock have a very hard life, as do their children. People who get divorced have a very hard life as do their children, and their friends and their family,” Smith asserted, adding that on the other hand, “people who don't get divorced and stay married and raise their children, generally have very good lives.”

“Couples who use natural family planning almost never divorce,” she pointed out. “The divorce rate at tops, we think is around 4%.”

In light of these facts,“who looks foolish?” she asked. “The Church for not changing a teaching that almost guarantees happiness or a culture that is pushing an agenda that almost guarantees misery?”

Also, “it is really, patently absurd for women to be putting chemicals in their body to correct a condition that is not a defect.

“Fertility is a perfectly healthy condition,” Smith emphasized.

For more on why contraception is against the natural moral law, this is a helpful article. (Interestingly, many believe the Anglican church began to decline after its decision in the 1930s to allow contraception.)

As always, the Church's teaching offers an unmatched anthropological vision, one of basic reason and common sense.

General Election: Good News for Pro-Lifers, Papal Visit

Last night's General Election results in Britain appear to be good news for pro-lifers and could auger well for Benedict XVI's visit in September.

Several virulent anti-life MPs lost their seats, some to be replaced by Conservative newcomers who have voiced their intention to support pro-life policies.

One particularly welcome result was the defeat of Lib Dem MP Dr Evan Harris in Oxford West and Abingdon, nicknamed "Doctor Death" for his militant secularism and anti-life views.

However, a Lib-Con government may be a problem.

Lord Alton, Britain's Pro-Life Record, and the General Election

Lord Alton of Liverpool, the great pro-life champion in the British parliament, is currently visiting Rome.

Last Friday night he gave a very interesting address to the Venerable English College.

As expected, he made some powerful points - here are just a few which stuck in my mind:

1) The UK government continues to use taxpayer's money to fund abortions worldwide, including giving millions of pounds to the UNFPA and others - not only to pay for abortions in developed countries, but also to uphold China's one-child policy. (He showed case studies of Chinese parents forced to have their children aborted using the pressure of torture and other means).

2) 600 abortions take place everyday in the UK, 40 million unborn babies are killed worldwide every year.

3) In the UK, unborn babies with disabilities can be aborted right up to birth.

4) Gordon Brown used a three line whip (in other words, all Labour MPs were forced to vote) to pass the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill which included allowing scientists to conduct research on animal-hybrid embryos - despite notable scientists saying they didn't know what the benefits of such experiments would be. (Interestingly even Lord Steele, who was instrumental in legalizing abortion in the UK in the 1960s, opposed the Bill, and has opposed legalized euthanasia). Britain is the only country in the world to have legislated in favour of such research.

5) Around 3000 euthanasia deaths take place every year in Holland, 1000 of which are involuntary - i.e. occur without the consent of the patient. He said that showed how, once legalized, euthanasia can easily be used to kill elderly patients against their will.

6) Something the pagans noticed which was different about the first Christians was that "they didn't kill their offspring."

What I particularly like about Lord Alton is that he is pro-life not just on the three key issues of abortion, embryology and euthanasia, but also passionately speaks out on other social justice issues, whether they be concern for the poorest of the poor in Calcutta or defenceless civilians caught up in the conflict in Darfur. Quoting the late Archbishop Worlock, he stressed that as Christians we should be concerned about protecting life "From the Womb to the Tomb".

I asked him afterwards who he thought was the most pro-life candidate in the general election. He said that the position of Cameron, Clegg and Brown is not as important as that of the constituency candidate, so when voting it's better to find out each prospective MP's position (he didn't like the TV debates for this reason - the electorate aren't voting for a president but for their local MP).

But when pressed, he said that although none of the party leaders score well on pro-life issues, Cameron is best because he insists each issue is a matter of individual conscience while the others take a more rigid party line.