"The world must be peopled!" said Benedick

It's a while since I heard Jonathon Porritt give a lecture of his own (as opposed to interviewing someone): I had forgotten what a devastating speaker he is when he's on top of his subject, as he was last night speaking on the theme "Too many people" at the Cheltenham Science Festival. He held a very large audience in the palm of his hand.

The message he brought was extremely simple: "Save the world! Have fewer children." The Italians had got the idea, he said: their population growth rate was the lowest in the world, indicating that "for them it seems that using a condom is a better guide to life than Papal infallibility." Benedick - yes; but Benedict - no.

Indeed, for a Catholic this was not a comfortable hour's entertainment. Jonathon was asked how the UN could be made more effective: "It has to act by consensus," he pointed out. "The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 was paralysed by the Vatican - a UN member - intervening to oppose artificial family planning." The loudest applause of the evening was for Jonathon condemning the Catholic Church's adherence to the teaching of Humanae Vitae as "immoral".

And yet. "Aren't you depressed at the lack of signs of progress?" asked a questioner. No, came Jonathon's response, because of all the spritual resources that remain untapped. (Here was evidence for Gordon Lynch's analysis, that I mentioned on Thursday.)

A final question was lobbed in. Jonathon had been praising the Chinese for having prevented 400m people from being born through their one-child policy. "Did the end justify the means in China?" a woman asked - the only woman to get a look in. A long pause. "On balance, no," came the eventual reply.

Isn't this the crux of the issue? Do wrong means ever justify good ends? We have since last year a beautiful granddaughter, born after very much soul-searching: how impoverished would our family life be without her! Not to speak of that child's mother, our only daughter - the fourth of our children, born after Caroline's doctor had warned her to have no more.

Burne-Jones' image of the Christ-child in Birmingham's St Philip's Cathedral misleadingly shows a white baby. Had the "necessary" funding for family planning - advocated by Jonathon - been available within the third world community into which Jesus was born, my question is: "Would he have been?"

"Food for the soul"

Professor Gordon Lynch, of Birkbeck College, in his recent book, The New Spirituality: An introduction to progressive belief in the Twenty-First Century characterises “the new spirituality” as featuring the need for:
• A credible religion for a modern age;
• Religion which is truly liberating and beneficial for women;
• Connection between religion and scientific knowledge; and
• A spirituality that can respond to the impending ecological crisis.

Makes a change from recent writings about fundamentalism and the 'religious right'!

In an article with the above title in The Tablet of 26th April - I have been doing some catching up: oh! the joys of retirement! - the Abbot of Worth talks about our having to learn how to explain our faith in cultural terms that modern spiritual seekers - and there are very many of these who never attend any church - can understand. “This,” he says, “is dialogue and evangelisation, in which the Christian both learns and teaches at the same time… What the whole Church offers to spiritual seekers is beauty and peace. With great credibility we can offer the beauty of our worship and the peace that comes from living justly.”

The photograph? I took it in Minerve, in the Languedoc on 31st December 2000: "La Colombe de lumière" - Jean-Luc Severac's monument, carved in 1982, to the 140 Cathars, burnt at the stake there on 22nd July 1210 upon the orders of Simon de Montfort.