✣ Highlights from the week online
An embarrassing admission – but why? My wife dreads being asked what she does for a living, said Tom Utley in the Daily Mail. “It’s not that she’s ashamed of her job – on the contrary, she’s proud of it and enjoys the fulfilment of working for what she regards as a hugely important cause” – namely, the pro-life movement. But her job for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children doesn’t always go down well “in the metropolitan, middle-class circles in which we move”. It is, Utley said, “a desperately sad reflection on our society” that pro-lifers are now being banned from outside abortion clinics – as happened last week in Ealing. The pro-life vigils have been accused of harassment, which they deny. “All I can say, because I have Mrs U’s word for it, is that the people who run the group disapprove strongly of bullying and regard it as counter-productive.” There’s another aspect to this. “In the huge majority of cases, perhaps needless to say, their efforts come to nothing. “But on those rare occasions when they succeed in persuading women to carry a pregnancy through to childbirth, the results are often profoundly moving. They say the mothers concerned almost always bless them ever afterwards for talking them out of abortion and helping them through.” What Michelangelo didn’t design Bad news for people who like a good story – Michelangelo did not design the Swiss Guards’ uniforms. He “can claim credit for the Pietà, the paintings of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and a lot of other great works of art,” said John Burger at Aleteia, “but he was not a costume designer.” The myth that Michelangelo designed the outfits has gained traction. In fact, the uniforms are based on armour common throughout Renaissance Europe. The fact that the current uniforms were commissioned in 1914 kind of makes Swiss cheese out of the Michelangelo myth.” However, Burger noted, the uniforms “were inspired by frescos of German mercenary knights, as painted by Michelangelo’s contemporary Raphael.” A meeting of two very different writers At ncregister.com, Joseph Pearce told the story of Hilaire Belloc’s talk at the Oxford Catholic Chaplaincy. Fr Martin D’Arcy recorded that “Belloc came out with one of his pet themes: that the Anglo-Saxons were utterly unimportant in the history of England. Now, there was present on this occasion a man who was probably the greatest authority in the world on Anglo-Saxon subjects” – namely JRR Tolkien. Although Tolkien disagreed profoundly with Belloc, he told Fr D’Arcy that he wouldn’t tackle Belloc unprepared. “He knew Belloc would always pull some fact out of his sleeve which would disconcert you.” Pearce said that Belloc’s history was often coloured by “Germanophobia”, which made him doubt the contribution of German tribes to the national culture before 1066. “In contrast, Tolkien considered Anglo-Saxon England to have been idyllically Christian.”
