Letters to the Editor: The Catholic Church must take charge in the fight against racism
There was a time when it would preach, with gravitas with authority, on all the moral themes of the day. Picture: Andy Gibson.
In the ongoing debate and controversy over accommodation for refugees and asylum seekers where is the once powerful voice of the Catholic Church?
There was a time when it would preach, with gravitas with authority, on all the moral themes of the day.
But scarcely a whisper in recent months as the ugly spectre of racism casts a dark shadow across the land. I can’t imagine the Church would condone racism, but I don’t believe that adopting a position of neutrality on the issue is acceptable either.
I’m not big into religion and I don’t purport to be any kind of authority on the Gospels, or the Bible, or the complex minutiae of canon law. But I ask: whose side would Jesus be on if he walked among us right now?
I suggest he certainly wouldn’t be shouting racist slogans or crying: “Get them out”, or “we’re full, we don’t want you”. No. I reckon he’d be where he always was in the stories passed down to us … defending the poor, the oppressed, and the vulnerable, including refugees and asylums seekers.
After all, weren’t he and his parents among the world’s best known refugees? As a child he and his family were hounded by Herod’s minions and had to flee their homeland.
And when he died, it was at the hands of men who greeted each other with outstretched right arms, a greeting later adopted by the far-right.
The Catholic Church should be coming out with all guns blazing on this issue. Priests should be laying it on the line that racism, in all its twisted, ever-changing, and conniving forms, must be anathema to anyone who professes to be a Christian.
It’s time for the men of God to get down off the fence.
If the developed world continues to neglect, postpone and oppose the measures needed to combat the climate crisis, 15 years from now, we will all look upon the small political domestic convulsions in evidence now concerning refugees and immigrants with nostalgia.
If I lived in Somalia, Ethiopia, Algeria, Sudan or Bangladesh I would do whatever it takes to bring my family to Ireland. Half a billion people live in those countries at the time of writing. fifteen years from now, at the rate we are going, countries like Ireland will be receiving refugees from the south of Spain.
This is not the fault of politicians or farmers or fishermen. But lassitude and lies and prevarication about the simple scientific reality that is the climate crisis will put every climate science denier to shame in no time at all.
We can’t get ahead of the climate crisis. But can we at least make some effort to catch up with it?
The deployment of our troops shouldn’t be subject to the triple lock. To have consent from a discredited UN Security Council for the deployment of our troops must and should be set aside given the wider context of European and world security.
Our Irish troops have served gallantly as peacekeeping troops in many different countries.
They are held in high esteem by many countries for their professionalism and dedication to duty in tense war zones and theatres of activity.
That there is opposition to removing the triple lock by the usual lefties who have never served their country, in uniform, using neutrality as a barrier to removing it, is what we expect from these naysayers.
Ireland is the soft underbelly when it comes to defence and security in Europe with derisory budgets allocated to our Defence Forces.
Lack of proper airpower, coastal defences, recruitment, and retention of personnel and updated equipment has made us the poor neighbour and dependent on our nearest neighbours to come to our rescue.
It’s time we as an independent sovereign nation threw of the shackles of non involvement and stop listening to those who would see us exposed to foreign threats from Russia, China, Iran, or their proxies.
We must be a part of European defence rather than the begging outsider expecting others to do the heavy lifting while we stand idly by waving the flag of neutrality.
Helen McEntee, the justice minister, on Morning Ireland on Radio One on Tuesday last repeatedly said ‘we have had returns in the past’. She was not referencing the bottle return scheme recently rolled out but people seeking asylum that she wishes to send back.
She is also on record last week stating that she believes 80% of those seeking asylum are coming through Northern Ireland, but has no statistics to back this up.
People are not “returns” and to refer to them as such is dehumanising at best and unacceptable in my opinion. Making potentially exaggerated claims without the evidence
to back it up, and referring to people as items to return is not helping the tense situation in the country at present.
Like some GAA footballers lately it looks like our Taoiseach strayed too far out the field, leaving an empty goal for a gleeful British PM to slam the ball into.
While I commend the action on the field by both sides last Sunday at Páirc Uí Chaoimh I was struck by the lack of signage to direct supporters to the various accesses and stands along the walkway on the walk up from the Monahan Rd side. The lack of stewards was also noticable and therefore most fans did not know where to go until they are right up next to the stadium.
A small expenditure can make a large difference here.
Nick Folley in his letter — ‘Divinity of Jesus settled in 325AD’ (Irish Examiner, April 30) misrepresents and caricatures my letter of April 17 (replying to his of April 12). I have never, and would never, describe the 27 books of the New Testament as ‘so much falsehood’, though it certainly contains false texts of terror (Matthew 27:25 and John 8:44, for instance).
He is (almost) right, however, that Nicaea “settled” the question of Jesus’ divinity, but my point was of a different order, observing that Mr Folley’s use of John 14:6 (and similar “sayings”) cannot be used as “proof” for the divinity of Jesus. The vast majority of reputable biblical scholars and historical theologians (Catholic and Protestant) would agree with Professor Ward that the historical Jesus never said ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’. In addition, Mr Folley’s use of the gospels, etc, to “prove” his argument is an abuse of sound exegetical methodologies.
It is bad theology and bad history to imply that the New Testament identifies Jesus with God. The claim that Jesus is God may or may not be true, but the New Testament does not make it; at most, John’s Gospel asserts that Jesus is the Word become flesh (1:14) — that is, ‘he reveals what can be seen of God in a finite human life’, to quote another theologian; and the words attributed to Thomas, ‘My Lord and my God!’ (John 20:28), do not validate Mr Folley’s thesis, regardless of what he may think.
I applaud Mr Folley’s insistence that creationism (a pernicious pseudo-science) has no place on a school’s curriculum, but what he says about the Pharisees in the letter is plain wrong, that they had Jesus crucified ‘at a very public trial precisely on this single charge of claiming to be God’.
It is a moral imperative, especially against the background of the Holocaust, always to contextualise biblical texts, especially those such as Mark 14: 61-62 and John 18:3, amongst others, to which your correspondent alludes.
For what it’s worth, if the historical Judas brought police, soldiers and Pharisees to arrest Jesus (John 18:3), then I am writing this letter from the surface of the moon.
Mr Folley may wish to explore the significance of this statement by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (and reflected in many authoritative documents emanating from the Holy See since the end of Vatican II):
It is necessary to remember that the passion narratives do not offer eyewitness accounts or a modern transcript of historical events.
