UK & Wales Bishops: Cowardice, Lack Of Faith Or Stupidity?

Jul 27

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The poor girl was swimming away from the bishops as fast as she could…

Look, if you please, at the photo above. A young, very dynamic, rather sexy young female swimmer is allegedly in the act of “using her body for the glory of God”.

When I first saw this my immediate, visual reaction (that’s what photos are there for: to cause immediate, visual reactions) was that the Olympic theme is used by our bishops to promote a campaign against obesity (a rather monstrous problem in this country), that is: use your body to make sport and live a healthy life, and all that jazz. Undertone: sport is sexy, and if you make sport you’ll become more attractive.

On second thought,  I reflected this might be an invitation to avoid premarital sex, that is: use your body for the glory of God and use your hormonal overflow to make sport and live a healthy life, rather than becoming a slut like so many of your friends.

Imagine my surprise when I realised this slogan (with the sexy swimmer, the Olympic theme, and the general atmosphere of hormonal overflow) would, should, ought, is actually meant to, express our Bishop’s opposition to – mainly, and at large – abortion and euthanasia.

Now, I admit there is “day for life” written on it; but come on, that’s the last thing you notice and at some point you would have noticed even if they had put on the poster the Paddington Bear, or an old teapot.

It gets even more interesting – and you start discovering the photo was not a coincidence – when you visit the internet page and discover that like everything else, the “day for life” is being watered down in a series or other fashionable, innocuous, uncontroversial themes like “disability”, “suicide” and, believe it or not, general “happiness”. This “enlargement” comes very handy, because if you start talking of  the necessity of building structures for disabled people (very “social”, and therefore by definition “popular”) you can conveniently avoid talking of what is unpleasant, like abortion; and if you mention a couple of platitudes about “happiness”, or the revolutionary message of the advisability of avoiding suicide, everyone is sure you are not going to touch the unpleasant topics like euthanasia.

This is all so anodyne, so obvious, and so fundamentally stupid that the indifferent youth might well like it, without ever caring a straw about abortion.  Great success, then.

The political advantages are also not indifferent: whilst abortion and euthanasia are controversial, “happiness”, structures for disabled people and sexy young swimmers aren’t; so our cowardly shepherds can try to appear Catholics within the Catholic world without anyone outside of it ever noticing they are.

The main message here is that the UK hierarchy has reached such level of cowardice, that they now renounce to even an indirect message about abortion (or euthanasia), limiting themselves to a visual image as distant as possible from the message they are supposed to convey, but still “attractive” and in tune with the “feelings” of the broad public; in case this should be not enough, they even conveniently drown the main theme (which cannot be other than abortion and euthanasia) under a tsunami of politically correct themes of easy digestion.

Astonishing cowardice, astonishing lack of faith, or astonishing stupidity?

I vote for the first.

Mundabor

Posted on July 27, 2012, in Catholicism and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.

  1. dunsscotus | July 31, 2012 at 7:28 am

    Cowardice, Mundabor, plain and simple. For goodness’ sake, the heretic Luther showed more backbone – ‘here I stand, I can do no more’. As much as I regret saying this, the modern Church needs to stand and say that these are the truths of the Church, and we’re not going to back down! Far, far too much ground has been lost since V2, frankly, – I can’t see any of the great English Bishops – Becket, for instance, or Cardinal Pole, coming out with something like this. It’s a pretty picture, but it just obfuscates the point, that hundreds of babies are murdered in cold blood every single year.

  2. akita-ette | August 4, 2012 at 4:58 am

    I daresay, in England, more than “100s of babies” are aborted per year. Here in the USA it is about 1.2 million per year. We are coming up on 55 million since 1973. Once, many years ago, there was a letter written to our diocesan newspaper about the adverse effect so many abortions would have on the economy. I thought that that was a peculiar angle. But today, with Social Security going broke, the US in grave debt, etc. I see that abortion has caused the biggest pyramid scheme in history. So few young people shouldering the burden of caring for so many baby-boomers. Some very dark days are ahead.

    • Mundabor | August 4, 2012 at 8:01 am

      In the UK we are at, I think, some 180,000 abortion per year, with a decreasing trend that has gone on for some time. Call it a full-scale Holocaust every generation, and with a much smaller population pool than the Third Reich had at its disposal.

      The battle for conscientious objection has been won some years ago (a prayer for all those courageous doctors and nurses who lost their job, and often had to emigrate) and it becomes increasingly more difficult to use the full possibilities afforded by the laws because of their growing scarcity.

      Still, all in all this is pretty much a moral desert.

      M

  3. akita-ette | August 4, 2012 at 5:00 am

    BTW, your bishops are cowards, plain and simple. Wonder if their skulls will pave hell?