In September 2003, Cuba's bishops issued their last major statement on the position of the Church in modern Cuba. It contained penetrating commentary, deploring the lack of liberties, the clampdown on private businesses, the penetration of church groups by state agents, and a repeated call for clemency for the dissidents who had been arrested and summary-tried a few months earlier.

I was in Havana at the time. Some 30 foreign accredited reporters filed the story, but in the Cuban media the silence was absolute. (The letter circulated anyway.)

Church activities are controlled in a series of ways. Emails and phone calls are screened; state agents sit in congregations, and berate priests if their homilies are too “political”; priests, bishops and religious know that the lay people who work and live with them are likely to be informers.

This snitching network – vast, costly, disgraceful - is not confined to the island.

At a conference on the Church and the internet  I attended some years ago in Monterrey, Mexico, I met eight representatives of Cuban dioceses who had been granted visas at the last minute to attend. On the last day they were befriended by a Mexican priest who sat in on their conversations. When they caught him photographing the websites they had been visiting  - Cubans are not allowed access to the internet - they grew suspicious. They made some calls; the priest was not a priest at all, but a Cuban state agent.
 
From a former rector of the seminary in Havana I heard an even more hair-raising story.

There was a knock on his door one night. It was one of the seminarians who had been there for five years and was close to ordination. “I need to speak to you, padre”, he said. “Outside”.

On the street he confessed he was an informer, placed there by the state. For five years he had led a double life: attending Mass, prayers and studies for the priesthood six days a week, and then, on his day off, going downtown to a house where he was given good food, rum and women.

Burned out, his conscience strangled after all those years by his growing realisation that the men he was spying on were transparently good (and those bribing him to spy the opposite), the "seminarian" had a nervous breakdown.

The Church -- virtually the country's sole NGO, and by far the largest -- is controlled by the Communist Party’s Office for Religious Affairs, from which permission must be secured for virtually everything – to renovate a church, bring in a priest, travel outside Cuba, or even buy a car (all cars belong to the state).

The Office maintains an informal cap of just 310 diocesan priests – with about twice as many religious – to serve the island’s 11.2 million people.

Some criticize the Church for being insufficiently outspoken. But the bishops know that speaking out will be punished by more severe restrictions which will make the Church's task even more difficult.

The Office deploys tactics of divide and rule. Evangelicals who avoid “politics” and issue regular pans of praise to Cuba's rulers receive permission to build new churches; the Catholic Church, which refuses such Ceasarism, has been denied the right to build a single new church since 1959.

The same tactic is used with individual bishops; the outspoken ones – notably those at either end of the island, Santiago and Pinar del Rio – are refused travel visas, new priests, permission to renovate churches, even cars. The message is clear: if they speak out, the bishops must weigh the consequences carefully.

But it would be wrong to suggest that the Church in Cuba is singled out for persecution. Msgr José Félix Pérez, the thoughtful secretary-general of the Cuban bishops’ conference, puts it well. “The Church is deprived of the  basic liberties denied to all Cubans, just as the liberties which the Church seeks for itself are those it also seeks for all Cubans.”

Cardinal Ortega distinguishes between “freedom of worship” and “freedom of religion”: in Cuba there is the first -- the right to assemble for prayer -- but not the second, which is the freedom to witness and express. But that freedom is denied to all Cubans, not just to the Church.  

In the 1960s it was different: 150 church schools closed, hundreds of priests and religious expelled, Catholic Action militants executed or made to work in labour camps. Cubans who went to church back then  suffered harrassment and discrimination. But today there is freedom of worship: people go to Mass, receive the Sacraments and ponder Scripture in burgeoning house churches  - freedoms which had long been in place by the time of the Pope’s visit in 1998, but which John Paul II's visit bolstered.

Church figures suggest about 60 per cent of Cubans are baptised, and between two and nine per cent regularly attend Mass. The priest shortage has led to an impressively lay-involved Church: there are some 450 house churches in Havana archdiocese, frequented by about 5,000 Catholics.

And while there is no freedom of religion, the Church manages to negotiate its way through the gaps in state control. Catholic schools are illegal, and religion is banned from state schools. But the Church can teach humanities, theology, and philosophy on church grounds, offering alternatives to Marxism.

They can be closed down whenever the government decides. But like much that the Church does, the courses are allowed because they offer a service to Cuban society.

This is true of Caritas, the bishops’ welfare agency. It is not recognised by the state and is technically illegal: officially, of course, there is no need for charity in Cuba because the state provides.

Caritas is huge: some 12,000 volunteers work in 600 projects across the island, its $1.2m budget funded entirely from abroad. It runs invaluable programmes, taking care of the extremely poor who do not officially exist – the lepers, the Aids sufferers, and the elderly dependent on the deficient diet of Cuba’s ration book.

It is in these gaps -- opened by the chasm between the official, or "virtual" Cuba and the daily reality -- that the Church thrives in Cuba, despite official obstacles, and a shameful lack of freedom.

Amidst the coverage of the muted celebrations of the Cuban Revolution's 50th birthday, some good news: Cardinal Jaime Ortega of Havana and four other bishops were able, for the first time since 1959, to celebrate Mass on Christmas Day in several Cuban jails.

Some of the prisoners were especially glad to see the bishops. They are activists in the Varela Project, a human rights petition akin to Charter 88 in Czechoslovakia which is led by Oswaldo Payá, a Gandhi-like figure who leads the fledgling pro-democracy movement in Cuba.

The clue to the Catholic inspiration of the Varela Project is in its name. The priest-patriot Fr Félix Varela (1788 -1953) was the first architect of the Cuban independence movement. He was sentenced to death for his campaign against slavery but escaped to the US -- he was for a time vicar-general of New York -- where he published pro-independence tracts. He is an “official” hero in Cuba, but far overshadowed in offical propaganda by José Martí, the nineteenth-century liberal patriot in whose mantle Fidel Castro has always sought to cloak himself.

In 2003 Cardinal Ortega issued a letter on Fr Varela's 150th anniversary -- officially to bolster the cause for his canonisation in Rome, but more particularly to define a vision for the transition. In reminding Cubans of Varela’s democratic and Christian vision for Cuba, he was gently offering a post-Castro manifesto.

The cardinal made clear that contemporary Cuba is about as far from Varela’s vision as it is possible to be. He described the “despair, tiredness and monotony” of Cubans, their anxiety about the future, and the desperation to make a decent living which has forced so many into illegal activities or exile. (Most Cubans are perforce engaged in "black-market" activities; the state turns a blind eye -- until they do something political. Then the police descend.)

Carrdinal Ortega also deplored the corrosion of Cuban society, its astonishingly high rates of abortion and divorce, its alcoholism and promiscuity, as well as the broken state of the Revolution’s much-vaunted health and education systems. He singled out for fierce criticism the boarding schools in the countryside where teenagers are separated from their families to be indoctrinated -- and usually abused.

There was nothing in the letter that a Spanish-speaking visitor to the island will not see for himself or hear every day from Cubans – in lowered tones on the street, or in the privacy of cars. But seeing it in print was astonishing.

Soon after that letter, just as the Varela Project was gathering a petition calling for human rights and democracy, came the most severe clampdown in Cuba in 20 years.

With the world’s attention deflected by the Iraq war, and on the pretext that President George W. Bush - who had tightened the disastrously counter-productive US economic embargo - was about to invade, Castro ordered the arrest of 75 dissidents, who were charged with aiding and abetting the imperialist enemy.

Many were well-known "independent" -- that is, illegal -- Cuban journalists  writing for foreign newspapers. But 25 of the 75 were leaders of the Varela Plan, which was the real target of the crackdown. (To have arrested the 25 alone would have drawn attention to it and them.)

The regime was rattled by the Varela Plan, because this was a movement for democratic change was coming not from embittered counterrevolutionaries in Miami, but from home: from Cuban Catholic laymen opposed to the US embargo.

Two weeks after the crackdown -- known in Cuba as the 'Black Spring' -- the Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White) group was formed, gathering on Sundays at Havana's Santa Rita de Casia church. To this day they continue to walk 10 blocks to a nearby park after Mass. In the spirit of Argentina's Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Cuban women dress in white, with each woman carrying a pink flower and calling for the prisoners' release.

The US bishops need to ensure that the release of the Varela Plan leaders, many of whom remain in Cuba's jails five years after their arrest, is high on President-elect Obama's policy agenda for the island -- together with a lifting of the US embargo, which has only buttressed the regime  

Those prisoners are the architects of the new, post-socialist Cuba: patriotic, democratic and Christian. Only when they are released can Cuba be recognised as being on the path to democracy.

(To follow: the institutional Church's position in Cuba).

In these end-of-year days, which the BBC does not call the Octave of the Nativity of Our Lord, the broadcaster invites well-known people to "guest-edit" its flagship radio news program 'Today'.

This morning it was the turn of my old boss, the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor. The Cardinal's appearances throughout the two-hour show and the stories he chose are here. Highlights: standing in the Sistine Chapel with 'Today' presenter Ed Stourton recalling the election of Pope Benedict, and an interview' with the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who reassures Cardinal Cormac he is "totally against" changing the law prohibiting euthanasia and assisted dying.

The other news generated by the show was the Cardinal's distancing himself  from a mounting chorus of criticism directed against the government in recent days by a number of Anglican bishops, who have accused Labor of being "beguiled by money" and "morally corrupt" by creating a borrow-and-spend culture. The Government did not take kindly to the broadside, with one senior party figure suggesting the bishops had taken too much mulled wine over Christmas.

Asked whether he shared the bishops' criticisms, the Cardinal this morning said: "I do not think that is the whole truth at all." And he made clear that blaming the Government for society's failings was a cop-out.

There's a nice carnavalesque feel to the program -- overturning, for a couple of hours on prime-time radio, the stereotypes of a secularist government, a hostile media and a defensive Church. The Cardinal must have been wondering why it couldn't always have been like this the past eight years: playing the piano, discussing rugby, refining his pasta-cooking skills, receiving reassurances from the PM, distancing himself from excitable Anglican bishops -- while the BBC, microphone at the ready, respectfully encourages him to clarify his thoughts on everything from golf to Gaza.   

Carnavalesque -- but also valedictory, not just because the Cardinal is shortly to stand down (an announcement is expected in January or early February), but because his regular interviewer, Ed Stourton -- descended from an old Catholic ("recusant") family -- is leaving the 'Today' programme as a regular presenter.

An era, in other words, is closing. The Cardinal and Stourton, who have clocked up many hours together on 'Today' over the past years, have been two of the most constant voices of the British Catholic elite: His Eminence's warm and clerical brogue, typical of the (now professional) children of Irish immigrants; that of "Posh Ed" redolent of an upper-class, Benedictine-schooled, effortlessly- establishment world. Both will be missed.

Adding to the slightly unreal feel to this year-end of British Catholicism comes the news that in the Archdiocese of Birmingham (the UK one, not the one in Alabama) a father and his son have both been ordained Catholic priests in the same diocese by the same bishop --  Fr Ron Cosslett, 70, three years ago;  his son Fr Dominic Cosslett, 36, on 20 December. (In case you're wondering how this is possible, both are former Anglican priests).

Over Christmas, father and son concelebrated. Is this a world first?

The BBC has the correct headline on Pope Benedict's curial speech story. "Pope attacks blurring of gender" is far more accurate than all those headlines claiming that "saving gay people is as important as saving the rainforests", and similar riffs on Reuters' misleading  -- see Fr Jim and MSW on this -- interpretation.

The essential theological point in the Pope's intriguing address is that going green while erasing God from Creation is a contradiction. Nature, he says is "the gift of the Creator, with certain intrinsic rules that offer us an orientation we must respect as administrators of creation.”

And he goes on: "That which is often expressed and understood by the term ‘gender’ in the end amounts to the self-emancipation of the human person from creation and from the Creator. Human beings want to do everything by themselves, and to control exclusively everything that regards them. But in this way, the human person lives against the truth, against the Creator Spirit.”

It's worth placing this papal observation alongside the tribute Benedict XVI paid last Sunday to Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) on the 400th anniversary of the condemned astronomer's telescope.

Galileo, you will recall, was declared a heretic by the seventeenth-century Church for supporting Nicholas Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun (church teaching at the time placed the Earth at the centre of the universe). For centuries the Galileo condemnation has been used by secularists as a symbol of all that is incompatible between faith and science.

Last weekend, the Vatican sought to reverse that symbolism, building on Pope John Paul II's 1992 apology and dusting off Galileo as a shining representative of faith and reason working together.

(Ma non troppo. According to this interesting AP report, the Vatican turned down the offer of a statue, to be located inside the Vatican gardens, donated by the Italian aerospace giant Finmeccanica SpA).

Galileo and other scientists had helped people better understand and "contemplate with gratitude the Lord's works", Pope Benedict said.

The astronomer is not a bad poster boy for the marriage of faith and reason: he was devout, as well as being a brave scientist. He looked through his telescope and saw the glory of God behind the amazing architecture of the universe -- as did Jesuit astronomers at the time and continue to today. That is a very different way of looking through a telescope to that of the nineteenth-century atheists, who used it to declare the non-existence of angels. 

Only, I can't help but spot an irony.

Galileo was condemned, at the time, because he was held to subvert the God-ordained nature of things. One can imagine Pope Urban VIII in 1633 using words similar to Pope Benedict's to the Curia: that nature has "certain intrinsic rules that offer us an orientation we must respect as administrators of creation.”

But it wasn't long before the "intrinsic rules" were overturned by the evidence. It turned out that putting the Earth at the centre of the universe was not God's plan at all.  

Mark Dowd, gay ex-Dominican and strategist for the Christian environmental group Operation Noah, is widely quoted in UK press reports as saying that in his curial speech Benedict XVI betrayed "a lack of openness to the complexity of creation" -- in other words, that papal faith in the fixity of male-female gender roles may be misplaced.

At the moment, there seems little room in the Catholic Church's "human ecology" for a possible divine purpose for homosexuality -- just as in the seventeenth century there wasn't much space for the idea that God has arranged the universe with the sun at its centre. It would be syllogistic to suggest that because the Church was wrong on the second it will turn out to be wrong on the first.

But it's striking how the homosexual orientation appears in church teaching as "intrinsically disordered" -- in other words, as contrary to the way God arranged the universe -- in the same way as the Copernican view appeared in the seventeenth century.

And it isn't a bad thought, at Christmas, to remember that the Creator of the Universe is capable of subverting its laws for the sake of His creatures.

Things are never so finally fixed that God can't rearrange it all. The arrogance of scientists, of clergy, of the wise, our own arrogance -- all get dethroned tonight by the Great Event: the manger-child, born of a refugee couple  and the Holy Spirit, in a cave, in a place somewhere off the map, to where the centre of the Universe quietly relocates. Happy Christmas.

This year, for the first time, the same song is competing for the UK Christmas no. 1 music slot, with a title borrowed from a famous Jewish-Christian exclamation.

Leonard Cohen's 1984 song 'Hallelujah' exploded into mass consciousness after it was sung by this year's "X Factor" winner, Alexandra Burke, a 20-year-old former waitress from north London whose soaring, honeyed voice and good looks wowed both the judges and the public. Her cheesy version -- watch it here, complete with clips from the hysteria-heavy show -- has become the fastest-ever music download.

Alexandra's success has provoked Jeff Buckley fans into campaigning for their hero's angst-ridden version, which is not so far from Cohen's growly original. (The best rendition of Hallelujah is, in fact, that of K.D. Lang. She doesn't have Burke's or Buckley's looks, but manages to hit emotional heights without ever being overwrought. TV contestants, take note.)

Alexandra's version is likely to make the number one spot, with either Buckley or Cohen hitting number two. Whatever happens, the money rolls in for Simon Cowell, the X-factor mogul whose company owns the rights to all three versions.

Meanwhile, what does Hallelujah -- a first-rate pop song, which took Cohen five years to finish -- mean? Praise the Lord for what, exactly?

He boiled down some 80 possible verses into its present five. David plays a secret chord that pleases the Lord; then a picture of domestic surrender, that some read sexually; then a love 'n war verse -- "I've seen your flag on the marble arch / love is not a victory march / it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah" - before ending with a typically Cohen fusion of sacred and profane: "..remember when I moved in you / the holy dove was moving too / And every breath we drew was Hallelujah." 

At the time he wrote it, a Jewish contemporary who had also gone religious, Bob Dylan, said Cohen seemed to have taken to writing hymns. (Dylan discovered Christianity, Cohen Buddhism). Hallelujah might just be that very modern hybrid -- a secular hymn, that offers faith in something bigger, a transcendence, while avoiding anything that smacks of taking responsibility for the new knowledge.

What Cohen himself thinks it means --

"Finally there's no conflict between things, finally everything is reconciled but not where we live. This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess and that's what I mean by 'Hallelujah'. That regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms and you embrace the thing and you just say 'Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.' And you can't reconcile it in any other way except in that position of total surrender, total affirmation."

-- suggests what contemplatives call a "peak experience", when the awesome oneness of everything hoves into view. But "embrace the thing"? What thing? What name? The Jewish "cannot-be-named" or the postmodern "nothing-outside-me"? Without the knowable God at the other end of a peak experience, it's narcissism, not otherness -- however it feels. As a snapshot of contemporary religiosity -- quite happy to borrow from the language of faith, while seeking its intensity if not its morality -- Hallelujah may be worth putting under the magnifying glass.

Back here in secular, recession-hit UK, there is not much theological discussion about the meaning of Hallelujah -- and a good deal of parodying, which is a standard British response to excess of any sort. My favorite is from a radio DJ, Chris Moyles, who describes the melancholy tragedy of missing out on part of his family's food order from the local Indian restaurant:

"Oh Saturday was a special night
The X Factor final was so tight
We ordered takeaway from the Prince of India
We had onion bhajis for the wife
And chicken korma with pilau rice
But when it came they'd forgotten my lamb bhuna
My lamb bhuna, my lamb bhuna,
My lamb bhuna, my lamb bhuna".

Critics of the Archbishop of Canterbury who try to dismiss him as a "bearded lefty" have been confounded by his very public disagreement with the prime minister, Gordon Brown, over how to respond to the fast-deepening recession. In comments yesterday on the flagship BBC news program 'Today', Rowan Williams was less than keen on the Government's policy of reflating the economy through further borrowing and spending.

He was calling for repentance on the part of the kings of the money markets. A lot of people were waiting to hear sorry, he said.  It was "suicidally silly" for him to wade in on economics, he acknowledged, "but I want to ask where these moral questions are". Repentance means getting a new perspective, he said. And there hadn't yet been enough of that. So returning to a pattern of spending and borrowing, rather than sustainable wealth, seemed to him "a little like the addict returning to the drug".

Because the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, opposes  prime minister Gordon Brown's attempt to stimulate the economy by cutting sales tax, and would reduce public spending now in order to offset some of the spiralling public debt levels, this made Dr Williams sound more Conservative than Labor.

The PM was stung into responding -- and to trying to make out that he and Dr Williams were on the same side. As the son of a church minister he always listened to senior church figures, he said. “But I think the Archbishop would also agree with me that every time someone becomes unemployed or loses their home or a small business fails it is our duty to act and we should not walk by on the other side when people are facing problems. That's the reason why our fiscal policy is designed to give real help to families and businesses and to give them that help now.”

Meanwhile, Dr Williams gives a rare and thorough interview to James Macintyre of the New Statesman magazine, in which he finds merit in disestablishment, explains why religious leaders should be careful not to condemn -- and admits to becoming "a serious addict of The West Wing a couple of years ago".

"I think, like lots of viewers of The West Wing, I thought: 'Oh, if only, if only it could be like this.' And I guess that [Barack] Obama is currently suffering from a kind of West Wing syndrome. The Bartlett icon, you know."

Dr Williams is often criticised for failing to take the moral high ground. Here he explains his discomfort with "saying things that really don't change anything, that don't move things on," and not for the first time reveals the influence on him of Rene Girard. "So much of the language that we use about scapegoats .... doesn't change anything. It makes people feel safer, but it doesn't make the vulnerable feel any safer ... I am very worried about the morality of simply sounding off."

On disestablishment - the idea that the Church of England should sever its links with the British state -- Dr Williams is suprisingly positive. His own Anglican upbringing was in the Church of Wales, disestablished since the 1920s, and he served as priest and bishop in that Church before being named to Canterbury.

"Because I grew up in a disestablished Church; I spent ten years working in a disestablished Church; and I can see that it's by no means the end of the world if the Establishment disappears. The strength of it is that the last vestiges of state sanction disappeared, so when you took a vote at the Welsh Synod, it didn't have to be nodded through by parliament afterwards. There is a certain integrity to that."

But he is wary of the motives of those who would pursue it. "I think the motives that would now drive disestablishment from the state side would be mostly to do with . . . trying to push religion into the private sphere, and that's the point where I think I'd be bloody-minded and say, 'Well, not on that basis.'"

The interview repays a full reading. It includes this verdict from a "friend" about Dr Williams, with which it is hard to disagree.

"It is not just that he is the most prodigiously intellectually gifted person almost any of us will have ever met, or will ever meet, and one of the most self-disciplined (in a monastic sense) of people in respect of the daily practice of the virtues and time spent [every day without exception] in prayer - all of which is remarkable enough - it's that he applies all the extravagant gifts he's been given in love and service. He's on the job [of being a disciple] all day every day where most of us flit in and out. This is a man who really has glimpsed what it means to live sacrificially, non-judgementally, honestly, generously, truthfully, in touch in a deep way with the wisdom of God. Rowan is uncommon."

Assisted suicide is back in the news in Britain, because of two poignant stories with a lethal cocktail of accompanying dilemmas: is it right to take your own life to end great suffering? Should it be illegal for people to help you do so? And is it right to show an assisted suicide on television?

The popular answer to those questions, worryingly, has NOT been "no".

Story one: a judge has decided not to prosecute the parents of a 23-year-old, Daniel James, who helped their son travel to a Zurich euthanasia clinic to end his life.

Story two: a leading British broadcaster screened a documentary Wednesday night which showed the moment of 59-year-old Craig Ewert's suicide at the same Swiss clinic, Dignitas.

Dignitas has helped more than 700 people from 25 countries to take their own lives (legally) since 1999. Switzerland allows assisted suicide -- as opposed to euthanasia, where the doctor administers the fatal dose. (Parenthetically,  euthanasia is illegal in Switzerland, but not in Holland and Belgium. In the UK, both euthanasia and assisted dying are illegal.)  

James died at one of Dignitas's sad little apartments on September 12. He was paralysed from the chest down in a sports accident. He had repeatedly said that he wanted to die rather than live a “second-class existence” and had tried to commit suicide several times. The judge decided not to prosecute his parents who took him to Zurich because they had tried endlessly to talk their son out of it.

The law has not changed: family and friends who travel with someone to the Dignitas clinic sill technically face prosecution when they return to the UK. But the judgement in the James case shows that  the law is unlikely to be enforced unless relatives exert pressure the other way.

But beyond the legal questions, it is the Canadian-made TV program, shown Wednesday night -- called "The Suicide Tourist" but renamed "Right to die?" for its UK broadcast -- which has sparked the most intense interest and debate. It follows Craig Ewert, a retired British Chicago university professor, as he travels to Zurich to take his life five months after he was diagnosed with motor-neurone disease. The illness left him without the use of his legs, in a wheelchair, and dependent on full-time care from his wife. He needed a ventilator to help him breathe. When he could no longer swallow, he decided to take his life. Euthanasia was an alternative to "utter hell", he said.

The controversy was over the showing of the moment of death -- one of the last taboos in reality TV.

The dangers are obvious. The problem with voyeurism is that people imitate -- beginning with Ewert's son, who lives outside Chicago, and has announced he will follow in his father's footsteps. We are creatures of mimetic - imitative -- desire; why should a severely depressed person not want to do the same? The documentary was well made: it was emotional, artistically powerful, obviously biased in favour of the "choice", and featuring at its center an admirable man in most ordinary senses. There can be few better advertisements for what Pope John Paul II called the culture of death. And the documentary was promoting a crime.

Yet most British people think assisting suicide should be lawful: 80 per cent, according to polls, believe doctors should be allowed to prepare the kind of lethal dose prepared by Dr. Hans-Jurg Schweizer in the programme.  

I didn't watch it, but there's enough in this clip to get a sense of it. Here's what happens. Dr Schweizer pours out the lethal cocktail, tells Ewert that if he drinks this he will die, and wishes him a "happy journey." Ewert, from his small yellow bed in a nondescript room, chokes down the drug cocktail, slurping apple juice through a pink straw as the ninth movement of Beethoven's symphony plays in the background. Then he dies, his wife by his side.

Everything -- from the serene and supportive doctor to the the tearful, hand-holding wife -- suggests "normal death". Yet that's just what it isn't.
 
For all the talk of embarking on a "journey", that's exactly what Mr Ewert was not doing. He was refusing the journey. Rather than clamber onto the rope-bridge, he was throwing himself into the ravine.

And for all that the program tries to get the viewer to respect the "choice" behind the decision, it put me in mind of the execution that closes Dead Man Walking. It's the same chilly despair, the same ruthlessness, the same stamping on a precious gift -- even if in one case it is involuntary, and in the second case "chosen".

If the program shows one thing, it's the gulf that separates the spark of life going out, and someone snuffing it out. Whether a person killing another person (murder, war, abortion, euthanasia), the state killing a person (the death penalty legal in many states of the US), or a person killing himself, assisted or no, the deliberate destruction of life is a monstrous thing. No amount of Beethoven and pity can hide that fact.

There is such a thing as a good death: it's when God remains in charge of the moment, and a person surrenders to His invitation of goodness and love while being tended and cared for. The death of Cardinal Dulles is a noble example of it -- as the love and hope that it has provoked here shows.

That's why no good death ever came out of killing. Because God doesn't kill. 

But you can be sure that demands to legalise assisted suicide will gather pace. As we have become more comfortable, our tolerance of suffering has diminished at a time when medicine doesn't just cure and relieve -- it also prolongs lives which to a certain eye are simply not worth living.

If you are a secular humanist, like most British people, you believe human beings are special because they are rational. And they have dignity because you can see it in them: the way they struggle, and make the best of things, and do so cheerfully. But when your mind goes, and your composure with it, and you're crippled and crazy, where's the value of life then?

Ewert was typical of many of those who leave the train at the station marked Dignitas: he was an extreme rationalist. What he says in the program is all carefully calculated and thought through -- except the most vital thought of all, which is that his life was created and not his to end. "This ventilator is God", is how he dispenses with that crucial thought. 

No wonder he says: "You can watch only so much of yourself drain away before you look at what is left and say 'This is an empty shell'." It's all he saw. That's all despair ever sees.

For the time being, the law holds; politicians, starting with the Prime Minister, have rushed to defend it. But in a country of secular humanists, for how long?

Christians in the Holy Land and abroad will be deprived of altar wine from Bethlehem this Christmas because Israeli soldiers are refusing to allow lorries carrying the wine to enter Israel.

The SOS has been issued by the UK importer of Cremisan wine, which is made by the Salesians of Don Bosco in a suburb of Bethlehem in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank. The Salesians have been producing wines for the past 125 years as a means of supporting their pastoral and educational work among the poor of Bethlehem. They make not just altar wine, but Cabernet, Reisling, and local grape varieties, with a combined production of about 200,000 bottles a year. The wine is famous in the region -- as anyone who has stayed in a Christian establishment in the Holy Land knows.

But for the last five weeks Israeli soldiers at the Hebron checkpoint have refused to let the wine pass, saying it constitutes “a security risk" -- presumably because it comes from the West Bank. This means that not only Christian churches, but also pilgrim houses, hotels and restaurants in Jerusalem, Nazareth and other parts of Israel will be without Cremisan wine this Christmas.
 
Because the wine is shipped from the Israeli port of Haifa, the sudden embargo has also made it impossible for the wine to be exported to church customers in Europe. It means that a red communion wine specially produced by Cremisan for Anglican churches (altar wine for Catholics is usually white) will not now reach them.

As Bishop William Kenney, an auxiliary of Birmingham (England) and a member of the Holy Land Co-ordination Group of Catholic Bishops, puts it: “This is a serious matter of the Palestinians being refused access to international markets for products, not just altar wine. This will lead to more hardship and suffering for the ordinary people of Palestine as Christmas approaches.”

UK churches choose Cremisan wine in part because its proceeds support Palestinian Christians. Some 30 families depend on the winery, as do hundreds of Palestinians both Christian and Muslim for whom the bakery and technical school in Bethlehem are a lifeline.

The embargo is the most serious in a series of obstacles faced by the winery this year, described by Cremisan's director, Fr Franco Ronzanni, in this Spanish report. Supplies of glass bottles have been held up as well as several truckloads of freshly-harvested grapes – rendering them useless for wine production.  Lorries to and from Cremisan have been forced to travel south to the checkpoint at Hebron, so that a journey to Jerusalem of 10 minutes has become a journey of at least 6 hours.

The Salesians also face the prospect of the Israeli Separation Wall slicing through their vineyards, in order to enable an illegal Jewish settlement to end up on the Jerusalem side of the wall. (I wrote in America earlier this year about the effect of the wall on Bethlehem.) Once completed, it will sever Cremisan from the Bethlehem villages where the workers live, allowing entry to the winery only through a new checkpoint.

But the impromptu embargo is the greatest threat of all. If it is unable to supply its customers in Jerusalem and Nazareth, the Cremisan winery will die -- and with it another vital element of the Christian presence in the Holy Land.