Confessing Evangelical

Interesting perspective on the papal election from Frank Johnson in this week's Spectator, who argues that In Rome this week conservativism triumphed over authoritarianism (paid registration necessary, alas - curse these free-market economics!). Johnson writes:

Irrespective of whether it is right or wrong, or will be good or bad, the cardinals’ choice of pope is an act of defiance unique in our time. We are encouraged to believe that the papal conclave was authoritarian. In reality, with its choice of Cardinal Ratzinger, it defied authority. Authority, in modern conditions, is invariably liberal.

Johnson continues:

I share the liberal view about the malign consequences of John Paul II and the Roman Catholic Church in such matters as abortion, contraception and Aids in Africa. But I am not a Roman Catholic. I would hesitate to impose my own run-of-the-mill liberalism about such topics on a force so distant from it as the Roman Catholic Church.

"English Tories should understand this," he argues. Tories often reduce everything to economics, but "there must still be a residual Toryism shrinking from an arid world in which we were utilitarian and rational about what should be numinous. Otherwise we might all as well be Blairites".

He continues:

It is the aridity, and lack of a sense of the world's mystery, that is depressing about, say, the liberal press or the otherwise informative Channel 4 News. There, every public figure or institution is judged according to how he or she conforms to the average London media figure.

"Did many faces fall?" Channel 4 News's presenter Mr Jon Snow asked the programme's man in Rome just after the identity of the new Pope was disclosed to the world. Not "Did many faces rise?" For Media Person, faces do not rise at news of conservative triumph.