Sunday 8th April 2012
For immediate release:
Attempts to purge British culture of its Christian foundations will leave the country open to “sinister of ideologies”, the Rt Rev. Mark Davies, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shrewsbury, has said.
In a homily on Easter morning at the Cathedral Church of Shrewsbury, the Bishop warned the faithful that attempts to extinguish Christianity would make Britain susceptible to “any passing ideology”.
“Modernising” was often in reality, the Bishop observed, an attempt to turn the clock back – as if the Christian Gospel had never arrived in this land, shaped its laws and culture and had never formed the basis of our civilization.
He reminded the congregation that both Nazism and Communism had set out to discard the Christian heritage of faith and morality which had resulted in “terrible consequences”.
Bishop Davies noted that although the hope of Easter shines more brightly amid the “gathering shadows of our time” many Christians were today “uneasily” recognising attacks on the nation’s Christian heritage.
Bishop Davies said: “Dr John Sentamu, the Anglican Archbishop of York, was accused of ‘exaggerating’ when he spoke of the Government’s proposals to re-define the identity of marriage as linked to a totalitarian mentality.
“Yet his analysis of recent history is clearer than that of many of the leaders of opinion in our society.
“It has, indeed, been the experience of this past century, as both Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have stated, that the most poisonous ideologies have arisen within the Christian nations of Europe.
“Thus Nazism or Communism attempted to discard the Christian inheritance of faith and morality as if it had never existed.
“They sought either to return to the pagan past or to ‘re-create’ and ‘redeem’ humanity by political will and ideology with terrible consequences.
“If Christianity is no longer to form the basis and the bedrock of our society then we are, indeed, left at the mercy of passing political projects and perhaps even the most sinister of ideologies.”
(Photo: Simon Caldwell, St Gabriel News and Media)