THE Pope has stirred an immense hornets nest with his exhortation to his British bishops to fight Labour’s Equality Bill with “missionary zeal”.
Inevitably there will be a number of groups who express outrage, including atheists, some (but not all) politicians, homosexuals and probably quite a number of Roman Catholics, of which there are 4.1 million in Britain.
The Pope says that part of the proposed legislation, championed by Harriet Harman, is unjust and violates natural law.
This editorial seems poorly informed. The writer focuses on the idea that the Equality Bill might unjustly force Catholic bishops to ordain gay priests. My understanding is that the awful bill would apply only to so-called “non-religious” jobs (such as presumably a parochial school teacher or accountant, etc.). I’m not defending the atrocious bill, of course.
But at least this author realizes that the Equality bill would be scandalously unfair and an unjust intrusion of the government into the life of the Church. Something Ruth Gledhill of the (London) Times and others just don’t get.
However, for me, the most revealing part of the editorial was this:
[i]”…it is interesting to note how far the legislators have moved away from the tenets of Christianity–still the official state religion in its Anglican form.
Many people, the majority perhaps, will see this as a good thing, in that they do not believe in the deity themselves and do not believe the laws of the land should be framed according to Christian teaching.”[/i]
Further evidence, if any be needed, that even in England, where the CoE is the [b]de jure[/b] established church, it is no longer the [b]de facto[/b] national church. It has become merely “the Church of a tiny minority of England.”
David Handy+
Passionate advocate of Post-Constantinian Christianity and Post-Christendom style Anglicanism