Bashing the Bishop 

I have had reason elsewhere to lament the woeful state of the Roman Catholic Church, my church as it happens. From the head down, like the proverbial fish rotting, it seems to be in decay. From the suppression of the archaic but, nevertheless, completely harmless Latin Mass which is enjoyed by many, old and young, to the more recent obsession with climate change. This began in 2015, shortly after the present apology for a pope assumed the keys of St Peter’s and published his execrable encyclical Laudato Si’ in 2015. We have had some shocking popes since the middle of the last century, but Pope Francis really takes the communion wafer for being the most ostensibly left-wing and unconventional (but not is a good way).

The influence of Pope Francis is clear through, for example, the work of CAFOD (Catholic Fund for Overseas Development) which annually has something to say about the state of the planet and has even turned its Family Fast Day into a festival of self-recrimination about global warming. But his influence extends right down to the levels of dioceses and parishes, as evidenced in my own diocese of Middlesborough and our illustrious bishop Terence Patrick Drainey.

Each month the diocese distributes free the Voice newspaper, which is the Middlesborough Diocesan Catholic Voice, to give it its full name. Many good things and good people fill its pages, and I have no problem with my fellow Catholics who do so much more for The Church than I do. These people display more sanctity each day than I will do in a lifetime. I would also be loathe to judge our bishop, my bishop, who as one of God’s elect, undoubtedly radiates so much goodness and mercy around him that he positively dazzles next to my faint glow.

But he lets himself down over climate change, and no more so that in his front page ‘Bishop’s Column’ in the October 2023 issue of Voice. The column opens with ‘Over the summer we witnessed some disturbing events alerting us to the fact that climate change is definitely a reality and that it is affecting us all.’ This is complete nonsense. Climate change, by which it is obvious he means the climate emergency, global warming, deadly wildfires, those kinds of things, is an increasingly disputed concept. Even Nobel Prize winners have pointed this out. He is also wrong that climate change is affecting us all. I, for one, could not give a damn about it, and I know plenty of people like me who are just keeping calm and carrying on.

The bishop ends his doom-laden column with: ‘The climate is in crisis, and it affects us all (there he goes again!). But it is the poorest communities who are suffering the most. Sure, it is such a global problem that bodies like the UN and the governments of all countries have to take it seriously.’ I can only assume that the bishop’s column was written in haste shortly before the deadline, leaving little time for reflection and revision. At least, I hope that is the case.

When he says that the UN and governments ‘have to take it seriously’, what could he possibly mean? The UN, along with other global organisations and western democratic governments like our own, speak about little else. The BBC Radio 4 Today programme is nearly wall to wall climate change, and our newspapers report daily on some new, but probably fabricated, catastrophe related to climate change. They seem to ‘take it seriously’ alright.

Your correspondent is genuinely puzzled as to why the bishop feels compelled to write this drivel. Is he trying to appear ‘relevant’, ‘in tune’ and ‘down with the climate kids’, all fatal errors that most churchmen have made at some point? Does he really believe in the climate change agenda or is he obliged to promote it, for fear of a call to the Vatican for a meeting without coffee? It’s hard to know and even harder to discover. I know others in the diocese have tried to find out by writing to him and asking. I have it on good authority that he is not averse to having the diocesan lawyers reply on his behalf in a less than friendly manner.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

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