Dog lovers everywhere are waiting with baited breath to discover the fate of Shroom. Shroom is a 6 stone Carpathian Shepherd dog who, in a moment of moral weakness, gave way to a passing instinct to bite a policeman, PC Michael Obern, on the bottom.
Shroom is not alone in the temptation to respond inappropriately to the police. We’ve all been there, even if nipping the buttock was not the exact temptation we had to resist.
The CPS is seeking the destruction of Shroom, and the court has been presented with mitigating factors. At the top of the list is the claim that Shroom knows and responds to more than 300 Latin phrases and commands.
The fate of Shroom is as yet uncertain, but this plea of mitigation is a sign that knowing and responding to Latin is still taken to be a real virtue in our rapidly decaying culture.
There are an increasing number of Catholics who might hope that the Vatican could be persuaded to adopt the same values of a British Magistrates Court and recognise that knowing, loving and responding to Latin might be considered both a virtue and mitigating factor when considering how the faithful might be allowed access to the Mass.
Prejudice abounds however. An exchange of views on the importance of recognising the pastoral needs of those who attend the Traditional Latin Mass took place on Twitter a few days ago. Austin Ivereigh was disparaging about the kind of people he imagined attended (not that he has gone to make any first-hand observations of course). “What pastoral needs?” He wrote. “Here in the UK TLMgoers are mostly white educated and British people …hard to think of any concrete pastoral needs they may have”…
It’s a shame that when it becomes hard to think, Mr Ivereigh’s reaction is to give up. It does not take an inordinate amount of intelligence or imagination to recognise that money does not insulate people from stress, anxiety, self-doubt, crises of faith, ill health or the threat of mortality.
Nor, despite his immersion in reverse racism, and inverted snobbery, does being white or middle class. Mr Ivereigh may not have seen as much Shakespeare as he would like, but the cry of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice speaks for all white middle class people, Jewish or Christian when he asks:
“If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?”
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