- Feb 5, 2002
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What is it about our bishops that keeps them so supine? Are there not any around willing to talk back to Rome?
Near the end of a long and fabled career, marked by a great deal of courage and no little success in the public sphere, Margaret Thatcher, who had been both the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the 20th century—from 1979 to 1990—and the very first woman to be Prime Minister, announced her retirement plans. “When I get out of politics,” she said, “I’m going to open a business and call it ‘Rent a Spine!’”
Known as the “Iron Lady,” Baroness Thatcher would have been singularly qualified to run such a business. And it would have thrived, too, given the great and growing number of the spineless, whether in public or private life, in need of immediate infusions of courage. Which she evidently had plenty of, sharpened by constant use over the many years she spent both as a member of Parliament and for the three consecutive terms she spent as leader of the British nation.
So, what is courage? And why does so much of it appear to be missing among today’s leaders and the people they represent? Knowing that a nation cannot long survive unless its rulers possess enough spine to do the job, why haven’t they stepped up and simply gone ahead with doing the right thing? What are they afraid of? Is it perhaps because they really haven’t got any convictions to begin with? That the best should “lack all conviction,” to borrow an oft-quoted line from Yeats, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity”—is that it?
Continued below.
crisismagazine.com
Near the end of a long and fabled career, marked by a great deal of courage and no little success in the public sphere, Margaret Thatcher, who had been both the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the 20th century—from 1979 to 1990—and the very first woman to be Prime Minister, announced her retirement plans. “When I get out of politics,” she said, “I’m going to open a business and call it ‘Rent a Spine!’”
Known as the “Iron Lady,” Baroness Thatcher would have been singularly qualified to run such a business. And it would have thrived, too, given the great and growing number of the spineless, whether in public or private life, in need of immediate infusions of courage. Which she evidently had plenty of, sharpened by constant use over the many years she spent both as a member of Parliament and for the three consecutive terms she spent as leader of the British nation.
So, what is courage? And why does so much of it appear to be missing among today’s leaders and the people they represent? Knowing that a nation cannot long survive unless its rulers possess enough spine to do the job, why haven’t they stepped up and simply gone ahead with doing the right thing? What are they afraid of? Is it perhaps because they really haven’t got any convictions to begin with? That the best should “lack all conviction,” to borrow an oft-quoted line from Yeats, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity”—is that it?
Continued below.
Courage at What Cost?
By Regis Martin - What is it about our bishops that keeps them so supine? Are there not any around willing to talk back to Rome?
crisismagazine.com
