Reluctant as I am to bash my bishop, especially in a public forum, I am afraid that I must. After all, this is not the first such bashing he has received.
As I left Mass on Sunday I picked up our diocesan newspaper Voice (January 2024; issue 496). It is free and I am a Scot. The newspaper is the Middlesborough Diocese Catholic newspaper, and the front page always has a column by our bishop Terence Drainey or ‘Terry’ as he likes to sign himself of. So far, so good.
In a series of bullet points he gets off to a good start on the ‘innate dignity of every human being’ and how we must defend children in the womb before taking a good ecclesiastical swipe at assisted suicide and euthanasia. All good Catholic stuff with which I am fully on board. He even gets in a mention of ‘modern slavery’ which is nice when we are so encouraged to dwell on historical slavery and keep on apologising for things we did not do.
Then he goes and spoils it. He speaks about the ‘integration of migrants and refugees who have made their homes here.’ But one crucial word is missing and that is, ‘legal’ in reference to migrants and refugees. On the one hand, are we not allowed to discriminate between criminals and non-criminals? And if he is referring to illegal immigrants, how much more welcoming could we be, offering them in some cases luxury spas, mobile phones and money?
Of course, he pinpoints the problems which are ‘xenophobia and racism’ which, while they may be ‘radically incompatible with our faith’ are not what lies at the heart of criticism of our immigration policies, the unsustainable levels of immigration and even criticism of some immigrants, especially the rapey and stabby ones. I see very little evidence that many of these wish to integrate and there are areas of most major cities which are little less than migrant ghettoes created by the people in them.
Later, he says that we must find out from political candidates in the forthcoming election what they think about religious freedom and the ‘right of parents to educate their children in accordance with their faith’. I assume, since he has said it, that he is in favour of greater religious freedom and those rights for parents. I also assume that he has not spoken to the people of Batley and other areas of West Yorkshire to find out how the religious freedom of Muslims and their rights to impose their religious beliefs on state schools so zealously promoted by their own police force, is going for them.
Then the inevitable chestnut about care ‘for our common home’ and the need to ‘tackle the climate emergency which threatens the future of our entire human family’ according to the Gospel of St David of Attenborough is brought up. Of course, our Catholic bishops are encouraged in this nonsense by the Buffoon of Rome, The Vainglory of the Vatican, old Frank himself.
One can just about tolerate exhortations about migrants and religious freedom because, however misguided, they are about being nice to people and that is the least we Christians should be doing. The Church has every right to take a view on social issues. But there is no excuse for one of the largest and best informed organisations in the world to spout easily disputable bollocks about a non-existent climate emergency.
When priests and bishops stray on to the world of ‘facts’, especially when those ‘facts’ are demonstrably wrong, they seriously need to consider getting back in their lanes. Religion is not about certainties. None of us know what happens when we die. We have no idea if prayer works, and we take unlikely propositions such as the Virgin Birth and the miracles of Jesus as matters of faith.
Catholics and other Christians are desperately looking for their clergy to help them understand the uncertainties of our faith in order to become more convinced that they may be certainties. I am afraid that telling us stuff which we can see, with certainty, is not true does nothing but undermine our faith in all of them.
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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If the hierarchy of any religion (excluding of course one that makes no secret of the fact that its aim is forcible conversion of the entire population of the world) stuck to making pronouncements purely on matters of faith and genuine social issues affecting only their own flocks, then more credence might be paid to these utterances. As it is adherents of any, or no, faith surely have no moral option except to follow their own path and ignore the messages and inconsistent predilections of all failed leaderships.
“… who have made their homes here … “: does that mean anything different from “who have managed, by hook or by crook, to make their way here”? Is everyone here to be thought of as at home, with all the rights and privileges that that confers? To be ‘at home’ is then no more than to have arrived somewhere, anywhere? Home is not then somewhere you might leave but only where you might arrive? And then you are to be thought just as much at home there as those for whom it was home before you? And how, morally speaking, do those who have succeeded in getting here differ from those who want to get here but have not yet succeeded in doing so? It can’t surely be mere success in having got here, perhaps illegally, that makes here ‘home’, can it? Here, surely, is just as much, or little, home for those wanting to get in as those who have got in? So should any and all be allowed in, to be at home here? No limit upon numbers at all? Completely open borders? If the Bishop thinks so, shouldn’t he say so? On this understanding of ‘home’ does anyone at all have one? The Bishop has abolished home.
Sorry to say that if you are looking for answers in religion, you are barking up the wrong tree. When leaders themselves are not clear as to what is the truth, what is right and what is wrong, such that they have to discuss the pros and cons, virtue-signalling all the while; advising believers to consult their consciences, making sure to keep a hair shirt handy; thence to make up their own minds and take action according to their own lights and limitations, reporting any personally-assessed shortcomings to the confessional – why would you suppose they have any superior insight?
Very well said. Most, if not all, of the ‘mainstream’ Christian churches seem to have badly lost their way with all these fashionable and relativistic secular concerns and creeds and are trying to preach a different gospel to the one found in the Bible. No wonder the CofE, for example, is arguably now stronger abroad, especially in less industrialised countries where faith appears stronger than in our ‘developed’ western ones.