Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

What is the use of Catholic Justice & Peace?

The Bishop of Shrewsbury Diocese has just got rid of his Justice and Peace co-ordinator. Justice and Peace groups were a feature of the early 1990s. There was a J&P coordinator in the Arundel & Brighton Diocese where I lived in the early 1990s. He did quite a good job in getting parishes focussed on J&P issues. A J&P group was set up at St Mary Magdalen's and we studied the Catholic Social Teaching (CST). From that group came two vocations.

As we came to study it, CST itself proved to be a mixed bag. Rerum Novarum having been deficient, in particular in relation what it referred to confusingly as "property", further encyclicals were then issued subsequently in an attempt to fill the gaps. These culminated in the almost incomprehensible Centesimus Anno of 1991 which was not studied.

Rerum Novarum did great damage in emasculating the Catholic working class movements for social justice at the end of the nineteenth century and helped open up the way for the spread of both worldwide Marxist movements and worldwide fascism as a counter-reaction.

See here which describes the shameful instance of the excommunication and eventual reinstatement of a priest, Fr McGlynn, in the Diocese of New York. There was a similar incident in Britain in which the Catholic intellectual Wilfrid Meynell was quietly sidelined, and possibly also Cardinal Manning - this needs to be investigated even now. Indeed, it may have a bearing on why he has not been put on the canonisation track when logically Manning is as strong a candidate as Newman and the two belong together.

The latest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate of 2009 provides the opportunity for a fresh start and lay people should be studying it, though whether it needs J&P co-ordinators to encourage them is another matter.

In my experience, J&P has tended to promote fashionable liberal ideals and socialist palliatives rather than getting to grips with issues at their root. This too, however, is due, I would suggest, the the weakness of the official church documents and statements, which fail to provide guidance and leadership.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...

Battery trains fool’s gold

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows. “I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair? ” My reply was as follows... Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre veh...