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REACHING OUT
St. AUGUSTINE'S CHURCH
NEWSLETTER Spring 2007 NO 65
TRIAL AND TRIBULATION
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‘Its political correctness gone mad!’ shouted Roisin in a
recent episode of Lynda Ia Plante’s ‘Trial and
Retribution’, when she was accused of being a
racist because she had arrested an afro-Caribbean man whose finger
prints were all over the murder weapon; she was
only trying to do her job. I suppose one could
accuse those politicians who are so keen to
impose new sexual discrimination legislation on
us all of the same kind of madness, and here I
refer to their undermining of the work of the
catholic adoption agencies which have for many
years found parents for some of those children
most difficult to place.
Most Catholics, and indeed most Christians, have no wish to
discriminate against homosexuals; for me the
issue of the catholic adoption agencies is not
an issue, as some politicians have made it,
about gay rights, rather its about the right of
individuals to hold particular religious beliefs
in our secularized and secularizing society and
to allow all citizens freedom of conscience in
certain matters. In any case in a society that
still relies heavily on the work of voluntary
organizations, shouldn’t those who keep those
organizations going have some say in making
their policies or must we all be told how
everything should be run by those who time and
time again have shown that their policies and
ideas simply don’t work!
It is a dangerous situation indeed when we allow politicians to
dictate what society’s moral values should be,
do we want them controlling every aspect of our
daily lives, a total nanny state? We don’t all
share the same beliefs, and that’s certainly
true when moral issues are concerned, but as the
British philosopher J. S. Mill once wrote of
liberty, ‘If all mankind , minus one, were of
one opinion . .mankind would be no more
justified in silencing the one person than he,
if he had the power, would be justified in
silencing mankind.’
Is it right for politicians to ride rough shod over
the feelings of the faith community to prove a
politically inclusive point, a community that
has always promoted social justice and offered a
welcome to all. Easter approaches and I am
reminded that Christians believe in a saviour
who died on a cross proclaiming a kingdom of
equals created by a God who accepts all of us
for who we are. Christians do not want to fight
with politicians but neither should we always
turn the other cheek. As a Christian there is
something that makes me feel uneasy about recent
events, some things that we always took for
granted about the kind of society we live in are
not quite how we imagined them to be and may be
its time we made our feelings known. As
individuals we should not be afraid to say what
we think is right, nor should we be denied the
freedom to do so. What a change to see the two
Anglican Archbishops come down off the political
fence and support the Catholic Church, and hear
one senior Anglican bishop describe the
government’s action as ‘amazing arrogance.
Your friend and priest,
Father Keith
LOOKING BACK
LOOKING FORWARD
COMMUNITY NEWS
PREVIOUS EDITIONS OF REACHING OUT
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