Sackcloth and Ashes review Ann Widdecombe on hedonism and self-denial

Terry Eagleton raises an eyebrow at reflections on Lent from 'one of the country's moralists-in-chief'

One of the great calamities of Ireland, to be ranked alongside Jedward and the potato famine, is that St Patrick's Day falls in Lent. Since a good many of the Irish give up alcohol for Lent, yet drinking on the national feast day is more or less compulsory, this poses a dilemma which not even the wiliest theological brains have been able to resolve. Ann Widdecombe's new book about self-denial isn't much help either, though she is right to see that giving things up is about a lot more than Guinness. Having listed some of those who surrendered their lives for their faith, ending with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's murder at the hands of the Nazis, she adds scathingly: "And we give up KitKats for Lent."

Martyrdom isn't the most fashionable of subjects in a postmodern age. It isn't generally recognised, for example, that martyrs such as Bonhoeffer and Biko go to their deaths in the name of the living. The suicide yields up her life because it has become unbearable to her, whereas the martyr surrenders the most precious thing she has, making a gift of her death to others. Widdecombe, a convert to Roman Catholicism, sees this. What she doesn't see are the millions who have been murdered or unjustly imprisoned by the political system she herself supports. She remembers being urged by a nun at school to "offer it up for Indonesia" when she fell and cut her knee, and only now realises that the nun had in mind an episode in which "500,000 people had died in that country as a result of political unrest". "Had died" is a euphemism for being slaughtered as leftists with the connivance of the CIA.