Stand Up 2 Stand Up 4 Vatican 2

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Text talk, eh? How kewl and down with the kids was it to write "4" and "2" instead of "for" and "two" (or "II")? Anyway, although this mob is being done to death, two commentsfrom me that I haven't seen elsewhere: money and age.

The first meeting was originally going to take place in property belonging to the Church (St Vincent's, Carlisle Place), but has now moved to a suite in the Westminster Thistle Hotel. That will cost money: so who's paying? Are the CAFOD adverts generating that much money?

Why can they find nobody under seventy to speak at their meeting? Michael Winter is a 79 year old who preferred marriage to the priesthood; Myra Poole has been a Notre Dame de Naumur sister for over 50 years; she said "I have always said in my life I gained more understanding of the real Gospel when Ken Livingstone was in charge of the former London authority in the 70s and the 80s than from any church". The Chair of the meeting, Frank Regan, is, I assume, the former Columban Father whose belief in Liberation Theology led him to be a trade union activist in South America before he married and retired to Devon, though he is still called on by Catholic Dioces like Clifton to run Justice and Peace, and Ecology shindigs (see here and here (the latter "here" is a link to that rarest of thing, a drippingly progressive "Spirit of Vatican II" blog)).

The final speaker, the assistant editor of The Suppository, Robert Nowell, is "merely" a translator of Hans Kung. In the company of the others, he probably passes for a Trad!

This being an open meeting, anybody who can spend two hours of a Tuesday evening in Central London can attend. The problem is that we are too polite: this meeting should be packed with people who are prepared to protest loudly, not just every time that a heterodox or heretical opinion is uttered, but every time the message of Vatican II is traduced.

But it's probably only old age pensioners who don't have to work the next day who will be able to attend.