Realignments
Dissident theologian Hans Küng, so long at odds with Vatican authority, announced in late February that he was completely at one with Pope John Paul II in his stance over war with Iraq. ‘It is clear that on this question, the Pope is recognised by everyone as a very high moral authority’, Küng said in the Italian daily, Il Messaggero. He was, he declared, ‘100 per cent with’ the Pope in opposition to military action against Iraq.
Clearly not in diplomatic mood, Hans Küng also had this to say about US President George W. Bush: ‘… if a politician is in love with power, arrogant, pursuing imperial ambitions as the head of a world power, and presents himself as someone chosen by God, that is a grave abuse of religion.’
The Vatican’s chief foreign policy official, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, was less brusque, but nonetheless direct: Saddam Hussein should disarm, he told an audience of some 100 ambassadors, including those from the US and Iraq, but pre-emptive or preventative war against Iraq was, he said, not justifiable. His summing up: war is justifiable only when it is undertaken to restore true peace.
The Catholic Commission for Justice Development and Peace (Melbourne) called the decision to commit to war morally unjust and illegal. Just for the record.
Sign of the times
On the front of a neat Federation house in a Melbourne suburb: a neatly painted placard that reads: REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME.
The Scandinavian occupants (and sign-painters) greeted our photographer warmly, told her to ‘spread the word’, then rode off smartly on very shiny bicycles.
Malcolm Williamson
1931–2003
Malcolm Williamson, the first Australian Master of the Queen’s Music, died in Cambridge on 2 March, aged 71, after a long illness. He was a myth maker in music and in life.
Malcolm’s highly intuitive gifts derived more from the pre-Aristotelian world of polyvalent myth than from the mundane realm of binary logic. Contradictions excited and vivified him. For example, he was at once a proud member of the Royal household from 1975 and an antipodean iconoclast who took the mickey out of the pompous with relish.
He was always the proud father of three children in whose Jewishness he exulted. From the end of 1975, Malcolm was the partner of his publisher, former Jesuit scholastic Simon Campion, a secular saint—esteemed by those close to the couple in much the way that Manoly Lascaris, Patrick White’s partner, is revered.
Dame Leonie Kramer, a