What should that basis be? Since there’s much to be said for either an elective second chamber, or for one appointed by an independent commission free of political pressure, the best answer would be a combination of the two.At any rate, a positive answer must be found. The Government defeats itself with its own argument: the more important constitutional reform is, the more essential it is that such reform should be thought out We cannot have a new constitution made up as we go along.. Does Parliament need a second chamber at all? In our view, the answer is yes, both for the purpose of revising legislation and for acting as some check on a government elected, after all, by the votes of less than a third of voters.Can it function honestly, even for an interim period of several years, as “Mr Blair’s poodle”, the largest quango in the land? No: nothing – not even an hereditary upper house – could be better designed to bring the idea of a second chamber into disrepute. What he condemns as “nihilism” is a secular outlook which rightly condemns all superstition, whatever its source, and holds that there is no single meaning of life in the over-arching sense suggested by theologians.This does not imply, as believers often suggest, a moral vacuum.

While he asserted the primacy of Christian ideas, the pontiff praised other cultures mentioned in the Bible, including ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, as “singularly rich in deep intuition”.
What I conclude from this is that John Paul II is in trouble. Although his 36,000-word encyclical appears to be an attack on the shortcomings of contemporary philosophy, it is really a broadside against secularism. When the Pope criticises philosophers for concentrating on “modest tasks such as the simple interpretation of facts” rather than a search for what is “beautiful, good and true”, he is really saying he does not like the answers they have come up with. Anyone who believes in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection should have few problems, it seems to me, with concepts like alien abduction and star signs which influence everyday events. Indeed, when it was published last week, the Pope’s Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) encyclical had little to say on these subjects, leaving it to a Polish archbishop to denounce “a naive faith in UFOs, astrology and the New Age”.

The Pope surprised many observers by acknowledging at the outset the contribution made to his theme – “the fundamental questions which pervade human life” – by Buddha, Lao-Tze, Veda, Confucius, Plato and fifth-century Athenian dramatists. Fr Balasuriya was re-admitted to the Church, but only after reading out a recantation approved by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who rejoices in the sinister title of Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Even so, I was never quite convinced that the Pope was going to lay into New Age credulity, partly because “Pontiff slams superstition” is such a deeply ironic headline. This is a Pope who has crusaded against contraception and abortion, and excommunicated rebels such as Father Tissa Balasuriya, a 72-year-old Sri Lankan priest who tried to reconcile Christian ideas with those of other religions. They would be condemned in a Papal encyclical, the 13th in a reign characterised by an austere – some would say deeply illiberal – approach to many aspects of the modern world.