Notes On The Secularist Jihad
YES, Tony Blair may have been pusillanimous to walk both sides of the street, depending - to be fair - on when and to what extent he was interiorly converted prior to his reception into the Catholic Church. No more hypocritical than the rest of us perhaps, he was nevertheless making choices about public policies of a gravity and consequential scale few Christians will ever professionally confront. The bar for the powerful defaults to high - one reason political life is judged virtually impossible for the quietly weak but wise who prefer to remain strong Christians. It seems at least possible Mr Blair lived by the Augustinian cliche - Lord, make me holy but not yet - while he enjoyed those last few years at No.10. Those interpretative scales balanced, it remains enlightening to note just how anti-Christian a great many secularists have become - whether militantly or casually so - in the former Prime Minister's increasingly broken and culturally sundered UK.
Take, for one example, news of the demands currently being made of the Catholic Bishop of Lancaster, Patrick O'Donoghue. He has had to appear before a Select Committee and explain himself for a pastoral guidance booklet he recently promulgated that insists on crucifixes in every classroom, orthodox education on sexuality (based doctrinally on chastity and the sanctity of marriage), no fundraising by schools for anti-life groups, and religious education based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. He also believes Catholic schools in his diocese should really teach the Catholic faith and even evangelise. To Barry Sheerman, Labour MP for Huddersfield and committee interrogator, this unremarkable - indeed, praiseworthy - agenda is a "worrying sign" of a new "fundamentalist" sort of praxis for the Church. "It seems to me that faith education works all right as long as people are not that serious about their faith," Sheerman said - quite seriously.
Tragicomedy briefly aside, the social and political psychology driving this sort of irrationality is itself disturbing. Quite clearly in Britain the Catholic Church in particular is being forced to play the role of proxy villain for others within that culturally adrift nation who are the real fundamentalists. If it's "worrying signs" Mr Sheerman and his radical secularists want to deal with, they're everywhere to be seen. But that would necessitate an actual, not merely a theatrical, courage. When the BBC is set to mock Christian tradition by broadcasting The Passion - a dramatisation of Holy Week in which Judas, Pilate and Caiaphas are exonerated - we can be sure, if we weren't already, that secularist warriors prefer churchy gentlefolk as cultural targets. Producer Nigel Stafford-Clark says he wanted Christ's execution in "context" - "so you can see it from their point of view and realise that what they did felt legitimate." And perhaps they felt nothing - as the knife went in.
Take, for one example, news of the demands currently being made of the Catholic Bishop of Lancaster, Patrick O'Donoghue. He has had to appear before a Select Committee and explain himself for a pastoral guidance booklet he recently promulgated that insists on crucifixes in every classroom, orthodox education on sexuality (based doctrinally on chastity and the sanctity of marriage), no fundraising by schools for anti-life groups, and religious education based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. He also believes Catholic schools in his diocese should really teach the Catholic faith and even evangelise. To Barry Sheerman, Labour MP for Huddersfield and committee interrogator, this unremarkable - indeed, praiseworthy - agenda is a "worrying sign" of a new "fundamentalist" sort of praxis for the Church. "It seems to me that faith education works all right as long as people are not that serious about their faith," Sheerman said - quite seriously.
Tragicomedy briefly aside, the social and political psychology driving this sort of irrationality is itself disturbing. Quite clearly in Britain the Catholic Church in particular is being forced to play the role of proxy villain for others within that culturally adrift nation who are the real fundamentalists. If it's "worrying signs" Mr Sheerman and his radical secularists want to deal with, they're everywhere to be seen. But that would necessitate an actual, not merely a theatrical, courage. When the BBC is set to mock Christian tradition by broadcasting The Passion - a dramatisation of Holy Week in which Judas, Pilate and Caiaphas are exonerated - we can be sure, if we weren't already, that secularist warriors prefer churchy gentlefolk as cultural targets. Producer Nigel Stafford-Clark says he wanted Christ's execution in "context" - "so you can see it from their point of view and realise that what they did felt legitimate." And perhaps they felt nothing - as the knife went in.
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