Killings have crushed hopes for an imminent end to the carnage in Gaza

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei led prayers for Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh at his funeral in Tehran this morning. He has threatened “harsh punishment” in revenge for his killing, which Iran is blaming on Israel. The New York Times is reporting that Haniyeh, along with his bodyguard, was killed yesterday by an explosive device that had been smuggled into the guesthouse where he was staying while he was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Haniyeh’s death came only hours after a Hezbollah senior commander had been killed in an Israeli strike on the outskirts of Beirut. Haniyeh had been involved in ceasefire talks, and the killings have crushed hopes for an imminent end to the carnage in Gaza and threaten to unleash another wave of violence in the region. In The Tablet editorial it is argued that the US has a much greater responsibility for the way Israel is conducting itself than it likes to admit.

What would they do? President Biden, Vice President Harris, Ex President Trump.

Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers have developed many nimble side-steps to defuse American pressure. Both the US and Israel might ponder the lessons of the Suez crisis of 1956. Britain, France and Israel jointly attacked Egypt while denying “collusion”. In American eyes, particularly those of President Eisenhower, Britain was in the grip of a post-imperial delusion, namely that it could still reorder the world to suit itself. So Eisenhower took steps to make plain that Britain’s economic ties with the US, on which it had depended since the end of the Second World War, were at risk unless the Suez adventure was abandoned. And so it was, with a face-saving formula. President Biden has never had the courage, nor indeed the willingness, to do to Israel what Eisenhower did to Britain. Would Kamala Harris do so, if elected as his successor? Would Donald Trump? The world must wait – and hope.

“The Tablet has been a permanent feature in my life,” Jon Cruddas writes this week in a personal appeal for a contribution to The Tablet development fund. Cruddas, one of the most thoughtful voices in the Labour party, stood down at the July election after over twenty years as a MP. “Throughout my childhood in our devout family The Tablet was always there. It still is today, both in the same house I grew up in and my own family home. I cannot imagine being without it. We require new sources of energy and vitality to rebuild our public conversation around a renewed sense of the common good, and The Tablet remains indispensable. Challenging, progressive and yet fraternal and empathetic, I turn to it every week for the quality of its journalism and of its writing – and also for spiritual nourishment.”

Brilliant writing; trustworthy journalism; food for the soul. Cruddas puts his finger firmly on what we are trying to do. And there is something else. Cruddas calls it “empathy”: the sense that we might learn more from those who don’t agree with us than from those who do; the Catholic instinct that if we shut up and listen we might hear something interesting. On a good day, The Tablet hits the spot like no other weekly. “In the turbulent years that lie ahead,” Jon writes, “The Tablet will remain required reading.”

The shortage of priests, the rumours of further curbs on the celebration of the pre-Vatican Council liturgies, and English Catholicism’s architectural heritage have collided in a fierce row in the Liverpool diocese. “There are two magnificent churches in the centre of Wigan,” writes Elena Curti in The Tablet. “They are the pride of the town’s Catholics, borne of fierce rivalry between, on the one hand, the Jesuits, supported by old recusant families, and, on the other, secular clergy backed by nouveau riche mill owners and their workers.” Until last month St Mary’s (completed in 1818) and St John (1819) were separate parishes, even though they are just a few hundred yards apart. Now, the Archbishop of Liverpool, Malcolm McMahon, has merged them into a single parish and has decided that one of the two churches has to close.

The archbishop’s decision has caused huge upset in a town where Catholic roots run deep. And if all this were not enough, there is an added dimension to the row. Archbishop McMahon has rejected an offer from a traditionalist Catholic group, the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest (ICKSP), to take St Mary’s off his hands. “The diocese has given no clue what it would do with the church it proposes to make redundant, a vital consideration given that they are both listed Grade II*”, Sophie Andreae, vice chair of the bishops’ conference patrimony committee, told Elena. “Closing a listed church without a plan,” Andreae says, “is usually a recipe for disaster.”