Posted on 01/29/2007 4:10:13 PM PST by wagglebee
LONDON, January 29, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – British Catholics heard a flurry of naked anti-Catholic sentiments expressed last week by some government Members and Cabinet Ministers in the “row” over the government’s decision to force Churches to adopt children to homosexuals.
Anti-Catholic, anti-clerical and anti-papal slurs had been, until as recently as fifty years ago, standard fare in Britain’s political discourse where the established state Protestant religion is officially anti-Catholic, but most British people, both Catholics and Anglicans, were grateful to assign them to history’s waste bin.
“I’m not going to have some bloody reactionary German Pope dictate the law of our land,” said one minister quoted by Mary Ann Sieghart.
Sieghart writes in an Op-Ed in the Times, that another admitted, “only half-jokingly,” that his mother had always told him, “Never trust a Catholic.” A third asked, “Where’s all the child abuse and paedophilia? In the Catholic Church. They should get their own bloody house in order and sort out the way paedophilia lies hidden.”
The anti-Catholic sentiment of Labour’s hard-left elite, however, is not shared by everyone on the government side of the House. Of the 40 Catholic MP’s of Blair’s Labour party, a majority wanted the exemption.
The Telegraph quotes Peter Kilfoyle, MP for Liverpool Walton, a working class region, “This is just one more reason not to vote for us.” Kilfoyle’s seat is considered one of the Labour Party's safest since 1964, with Labour polling over 70% of the vote in every general election since 1992.
Kilfoyle said his constituents and many like-minded Britons would not take kindly at voting time to a Labour Party that appears to be bullying churches. Describing his constituents as “not the most enlightened people” Kilfoyle said, “They would be viewed by the London liberal tendency that is pushing this agenda as reactionary.”
“But they are decent people, with decent values, and they do not understand why the Government is doing this. They will react with disgust if any of the agencies do close. We will pay a heavy price and lose votes all over the country.”
Joe Benton, the MP for neighbouring Bootle, said, “I have strong reservations over this. Nothing has persuaded me that it is right. There should be an exemption for the Church. We are getting ourselves into a terrible mess.”
British public opinion is almost exactly divided, with polls showing 42 per cent favouring an exemption and 43 per cent against. The Guardian reports today that the most recent polls show public trust in the Labour government has fallen to 21%, with “personal satisfaction” of Blair rating at just 26%.
Tony Blair's wife and children are Catholic, he attends Mass every week and is rumored to have either secretly converted or will upon leaving office. There are many prominent British Catholics, I am astonished that none of them are coming forward.
It was my understanding that Mrs. Blair is a Catholic but not what one would call an "orthodox" Catholic. A "Google" on her audience with the Pope might disclose more.
Of course he was referring to the traditions of the Navy . . . but it just seemed to fit.
More on Mrs. Blair's audience with the Holy Father:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1623973/posts
John 12:
3Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.4Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray him,
5Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?
. . . of course, you know how well that turned out.
A foster mother pays tribute to the Archbishop of Canterbury's compassion
Read on into the article:
Liam Lucas was just one of the children abused by predatory paedophiles who took advantage of far-Left Islington Council's childcare policies in the Eighties and Nineties, when it pro-actively recruited gay social workers.Paedophiles exploited its well-intentioned commitment to equal opportunities and soon most of Islington's 12 children's homes had child molesters on the staff who cynically pretended to be ordinary homosexuals. Numerous children and other staff made allegations of abuse, but were branded homophobes and ignored.
. . . religion is not the problem -- the problem is chickenhawks and liberals.
You might look into her beliefs on abortion and condoms for the prevention of AIDS. She has upset some Life groups in Great Britain. Whether this is a tempest in a teapot, or whether she is truly pro abort is not known to me. I had heard that she was a bit of a loose cannon, however.
And of course some new P.C. movies coming out deal with the issue of sexual "specieism" and why folks can't just get along with their pet llamas and be left alone by society.
That has worked out just smashingly in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea, the Peoples' Republic of China (or any other so-called "Peoples' Republic") ... Cuba is just 90 miles off Florida ... I hear they have a wonderful little religion-free country going on down there.
Sounds like the world would be better off without any atheists in the world, if all they can do is imprison folks who disagree with them, mass murder any population that gets in their way, threaten the rest of the world with nuclear annihilation, or create the world's worst cases of catastrophic environmental pollution.
I'm fully with you on this one my friend. :) It is patently unchristian to force the Church to adopt to homosexuals. Whoever those clowns are in Britain who are doing this, they ain't my guys. :)
As far as I can tell, the Anglicans have become a pseudo-Christian farce (though they are still a little better than the American Episcopalians), I do not think there is much of what you would recognize as Evangelical Protestantism in England.
I am delighted that you recognize that there are pressing moral issues (abortion, homosexuality, teen sex, etc.) where Catholics and Evangelicals not only can but actually must stand united on.
God Bless :-)
Amen! I remember around election time last year I was going nuts on the internet trying to get the real word out about the satanic stem-cell amendment here in MO. Even though we lost by a very slim margin, I still got to work arm-in-arm with many good Catholics and it was truly a blessing. :) Thanks for all of your pings to these very important issues.
Christians donate much in terms of money and time to society. We couldn't function without them.
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