UK And The Death Of Christianity

In another stunning example of how stupid we have become, one of the auxiliary bishops of Westminster has joined the choir of those reacting with dismay at the findings of the recent report of the UK health Ombudsman.

Let us leave aside the specifics (an organisation titling their report “dying without dignity” is obviously affected by compulsive busybodying, political interests, pathological attention whoring or desire to safeguard its own existence), and let us delve into the real news.

An entire Country sinks into the deepest pit of atheism, and a chap who apparently has the title of bishop finds he must go to the press to express a purely secular grievance: that this army of atheists runs some risk of not going to hell in sufficient comfort.

The article – published in a Catholic weekly, and therefore not suspect of having kept out the spiritual part – has only the vaguest mention of “spiritual care”, but the fact that the vast majority of people doesn't ever think of dying with any sort of sacrament – real, or Protestant – or even the slightest sort of preparation (as in “forgive me, Father, because I have sinned”) does not register at all with the bishop. Does he have idea of how many people die in utter atheism? Of course he has! He just doesn't care! But look, that chap there died suffering! How horrible!

It all makes sense, of course. If the bishop believes in God, it is obvious he has no thought of hell. If you are not worried about hell the immense drama of all those people dying in their atheism is just nowhere to be found; but let an ombudsman whose existence many of us did not even know make some noise with some extreme and isolated cases, and there you have the man on the barricades.

The bishop complains people can't die well anymore. What he does not say is that in order to die well you need to think well; which is something he is unable to do in the first place, but demands from other that they get it out of he does not say what; because hey, damnation and hell are taboos in modern Catholic publications.

But hell is exactly the matter: once upon a time people knew how to die because they accepted the brutal reality not only of life after death, but of an irrevocable judgment to be passed immediately after death. This obvious knowledge coloured their entire existence, and obviously greatly influenced their way of dying.

The bishop asks people to die better, but does not even mention what radical re-thinking is necessary in order to be able to do so. Worse still, he sinks himself into the same pit of wordliness by making of a purely wordly concern the main reason of his intervention.

Hell is not mentioned with a word, as the complaint is uttered that an already extremely pampering health system (one that would have been beyond the dreams of comfort of countless generations before us) does not pamper well enough.

This is the reality of the Catholic Church in this beginning of the XXI Century; as the West dechristianises, led by its own shepherds.

M