I have just added Joanna Bogle to the "Interesting Sites" link. She is the type of woman I would like to have dinner with, so if you are in Brighton, Joanna....
In this extract she lays into the Blairs, if only one of our Bishop's was as outspoken in their condemnation of this couple who in their public lives contradict so much that the Catholic Church teaches and demands from its members. I, like the Bishop's, am always afraid of getting into party politics but under the Blair tenure ..... well read Joanna, but their Lordships are grossly irresponsible not to say anything.
Let's not mention the exta-ordinary Aztec re-birthing rituals both took part in a few years ago in South America, or the New Age nonsense that seems to surrond them.
Here is Joanna...
"Email from an American correspondent who - like many across the pond - seems to think that Blair is a man of integrity who "may become a Catholic". For goodness' sake, let's get this right. Of course Blair will officially join the Catholic Church once he ceases to be Prime Minister - he knows perfectly well that it is the only Church with any power. There's no status or useful platform in Anglicanism. As a pro-abortion Catholic (he has a 100 per cent pro-abortion voting record) and a campaigner for the whole "homosexual-rights" agenda (he was chief guest at their debauched show at the Royal Albert Hall to raise cash for a militant gay-rights initiative), he will have massive scope for his new career, while Cherie will amost certainly have a role as some sort of roving ambassador for a revamped "Catholics for a Free Choice" type of organisation. Her big fund-raiser at 10 Downing Street in aid of Planned Parenthood a while back was a success: it ensured a great start to the scheme to distribute coloured and fruit-flavoured condoms (I'm not inventing this) to teenagers under the slogan "Lust for Life.
"Blair has played a major political role in ensuring the collapse of morals in our country. He has led us into an appalling war which will result in the destruction of one of the few countries in the Middle East where there were reasonably strong Christian communities, which may well now disappear. Our Armed Forces are under extreme pressure, our crime rate soars, and Government policies openly promote schemes to smash traditional marriage and family life. Yet deluded Americans still talk about "Tony Blair, man of integrity".....please, please look at what is actually happening, and don't have an image of Britain that is based on 1950s films!"
30 comments:
Could we have Joanna Bogle for Prime Minister, please? If you get the dinner, persuade her that the country needs her.
Thank goodness someone has said this publicly. It is very disappointing that we hear nothing of this from the bishops, but is anyone surprised about that? What's in it for them?
If Blair does become a Catholic, then shame on whoever receives him, given the very public nature of his known dissent from Catholic moral teaching. How can he (or the priest who receives him) believe that he could make a profession of faith in the Catholic faith with integrity?
It's woman like Joanna Bogle, Daphne Mcleod, Mother Angelica and the late Mother Teresa who will help regain Christianity and Catholicism in the West - not male bishops of the type we're often lumbered with in the UK (the good ones are too much in the moniority).
I wholeheartedly endorse Mrs Bogle's comments, I have never admired BLair,he combines the sincerity of a double glazing salesman with the self righteous tone of a prepackaged Redemptorist press homily. I'll sign off now before I go through the roof
Tony Blair reminds me of a bishop l recently met...
It's said that in a democracy you get the government you deserve.
Given the spiritual state the nation is in it's no wonder that it elects an abortion/gay rights enthusiast like Blair who tries to wage World War III with a peacetime economy and a shrinking military.
And for a barrister the man's so inept at argument that he took the nation to war in Iraq on a dubious premiss, even though a sound one was available to him if only he had used his brain to discover it and the Attorney-General had done his homework.
But in final analysis, it's the Church which is responsible for the spiritual state of the nation.
Where's that verse that runs: "If my people who are called by my name . . . "?
Monstrous, to think that he might actually be received into the Church but then Fr Michael Seed, their chaplain seems to welcome anyone. The joke in the Westminster diocese is, "six good dinners and your in."
I would think that as he represents himself as an "almost" Catholic, the Cardinal should correct any misunderstanding the Blairs might have.
I regard him as an unrepentant public sinner.
tc,
Which one?
It would be scandalous for Blair to become a Catholic. Fr Seed needs to be reigned in.
It'll certainly be an interesting first confession!
However, is it really "scandalous" for him to become a Catholic? I find that an objectionable thing for a Priest to say, as you are meant to be eager for the salvation of souls, whatever they have done. You doubt his motivations, but perhaps the Holy Spirit will touch his heart. We're not a club are we? "Scandal" suggests, "Sorry, we don't accept public sinners (or in the case of Blair), wilful murderers into the Church."
You could have said the same about St. Paul had you been a Christian at the time. He was after all, persecuting Christians violently before his conversion.
Someone I know said the exact same thing about Ann Widdecombe. Did she vote against the Iraq war? Or in favour?
Well, I don't agree with much of what Mr Blair has done, but I'm sure Fr Michael Seed has enough wisdom to know WHEN Mr Blair is ready and is in full communion with the Church, in mind and heart. You never know, maybe one day he will be a public penitent.
I agree with Fr Boyle, it would be scandalous to receive Blair into the Church in the foreseeable future. Salvation comes through repentence, Blair has been consistent in his support of abortion. In that sense he has been complicit in the abortion of so many. The Church has taught consistently that those who take part in abortion are by that very act excommunicated. If anything a politician like Blair, is more guilty than a frightened girl on a sink estate in the East End.
Writing as a priest who has worked in London, I would have to observe that Fr Seed, while a charming man, is notorious for giving only perfunctory instruction to illustrious converts
It's not just Tony Blair, it's the whole constitution since 1688.
When Elizabeth I definitively broke with Rome she shackled the Church of England in violation of the common law which was then supreme over statute. For Magna Carta had it that "the Church in England shall have her rights entire and her liberties inviolate."
The English Reformation was carried through by force of statute, and was unconstitutional until 1688, by which time the law of God had become unknown to the courts and been displaced by Act of Parliament.
Lord Reid stated, in Pickin v British Railways Board [1974], the rule that puts the courts in perjury of Her Majesty's Coronation Oath:
"In earlier times many learned lawyers seemed to have believed that an Act of Parliament could be disregarded in so far as it was contrary to the law of God or the law of nature or natural justice, but since the supremacy of Parliament was finally demonstrated by the revolution of 1688 any such idea has become obsolete."
Let's remember that the next time a Sovereign swears to "uphold the law of God and the true profession of the Gospel."
The Blairs are obviously committed to their family, what we need are politicians committed to the FAMILY then society might actually chang dor the better, but who is there?
There does seem to be an aweful lot of priests in London who specialise in the spiritual maladies of the very rich and powerful or powerful.
Does it come from the top?
Fr Boyle is absoluetly right to describe any possible conversion by Blair as a 'scandal' given the public knowledge about his record on moral teaching. Such a comment by a priest is a brave one, not an "objectionable" one. Charity works both ways.
While Blair's heart and mind are known only to God, the public manifestation of a conversion, where he will in effect declare his support for everything the Catholic Church teaches, while also publicly repudiating that teaching by his public voting record, will indeed be a cause of scandal. There is nothing "objectionable" in pointing out this fact.
Fr Seed (or, indeed, anyone else involved in this) needs to exercise great prudence here.
"Sorry, we don't accept public sinners (or in the case of Blair), wilful murderers into the Church."
We need to hear that more often, we believe that if we are "in Christ", we have become a new creation, and God dwells in us.
Faith is a supernatural gift but if someone has it, we should see the outward manifestion of people's lives. In the case of public figures, by the causes they support. In the case of politicians by their voting record.
Allow me to be provocative. Ann Widdicombe was Under Secretary of State at the Department of Employment in 1993, and was promoted to Minister of State at the same Department in 1994.
She was accepted into the Catholic Church without having arranged for her heavenly record card to be adjusted in regard to the obligation to safeguard:
(1) Full employment (Pius XI Divini Redemptoris): "The State must take every measure necessary to supply employment, particularly for the heads of families and for the young." (n.75)
(2) The family wage (Pius XI Quadragesimo Anno): "In the first place, the worker must be paid a wage sufficient to support him and his family." (n.71)
On the other hand, if she had done her Christian duty Margaret Thatcher might have paid her a visit and put her to a martyr's death!
Michael,
The killing of the innocent. in the womb is not the same as failure to "supply needs" or even provide a just wage, what this should be is always going to be subject to a particular political view point. Authorising the killing of the innocent, is always objectively evil.
Politicians may well think that they cannot overcome particular ills within society, in which case they have a moral duty to do all they can to improve a situation.
Last year there was a serious attempt by many politicians to reduce the age of abortion, Mr Blair washed his hand of that.
I'm aware, Father, that authorising a sin against the fifth commandment is not of the same species as authorising a sin against the tenth, nor as committing the sin against the first and fourth in which enrolling in Freemasonry consists. The point is that, egregious as the legal authorisation of abortion is, any of these would be a bar to receiving Holy Communion, or to becoming a Catholic.
But Scripture brands wilful murder and defrauding labourers of their wages as sins crying to heaven for vengeance (James 5:4), and equates depriving a man of his livelihood to murder (Sirach 34:20-22).
Furthermore, the Papal encyclicals I quoted in my previous posts use the peremptory term "must" in their admonitions to State and employer.
In any event it can easily be a mortal sin for a person in public authority, given the grave responsibilities of office, to fail in his duty to see that as many people as possible who need to work in order to live have a genuine opportunity to do so, and that employers are held to their natural duty to pay a family wage, on pain of guilt of theft.
Unless I am mistaken theologians generally hold that the employer who underpays when not himself under constraint would sin in a grave matter as soon as the aggregate amount of underpayment equalled or exceeded a day's wage actually paid.
Michael, I have never heard anything so silly. As someone of eastern European peasant stock I was brought up to repect the opinions of the offspring of the aristocracy, but you fail to understand the context of Pius IX's statement. He was speaking in the context of mass starvation in Europe at the time and therefore of the obligation governments to ensure a minimum wage simply to keep body and soul together.
Read what the catechism has to say about abortion in comparison to other sins, understand the Church's teaching.
I know that I have now let myself and everyone else in for a long, long answer, for which I appologise.
I agree with Gladys very much so, but if Blair is a protestant, which he has remained throughout his tenure, then he hasn't believed what the Church believes about abortion, therefore isn't it a case of "forgive them, for they know not what they do?" Throughout his tenure at number 10, he has never actually been a Catholic, therefore who are we to judge him according to Catholic faith and morals?
If it would help, Petra, I am also of East European peasant stock. My father was a Slovene from the far northern Croatian region of Medjumurje. And from the stories he used to tell me, it was clear that growing up on the farm, with shoes on his feet only during the winter months, falling asleep at school because he was so hungry all the time, was highly unfunny.
Please don't think I'm playing down the unique gravity of abortion - what I'm saying is that there are a lot of grave sins you can commit notoriously and publicly, and which should by rights be a bar to being received into the Church unless properly renounced and repented of.
And you're wrong about the context in which Pius XI was teaching. Quadragesimo Anno was written in the 1930's to update and review Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum which had been written forty years earlier specifically about the condition of the industrial working class.
Leo had been Apostolic Nuncio to Belgium, and he had an opportunity to observe the conditions in which workers lived there, and in Britain which he used to visit incognito.
Divini Redemptoris was specifically about atheistic Communism. The Pope's remedy was to remove the appeal of Communism by prescribing that the State intervene to reduce and eventually eliminate propertylessness among the working class, a vision developed further by Hilaire Belloc in his Essay on the Restoration of Property:
"But social justice cannot be said to have been satisfied as long as workingmen are denied a salary that will enable them to secure proper sustenance for themselves and for their families; as long as they are denied the opportunity of acquiring a modest fortune and forestalling the plague of universal pauperism; as long as they cannot make suitable provision through public or private insurance for old age, for periods of illness and unemployment. In a word, to repeat what has been said in Our Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno: "Then only will the economic and social order be soundly established and attain its ends, when it offers, to all and to each, all those goods which the wealth and resources of nature, technical science and the corporate organization of social affairs can give. These goods should be sufficient to supply all necessities and reasonable comforts, and to uplift men to that higher standard of life which, provided it be used with prudence, is not only not a hindrance but is of singular help to virtue." (Divini Redemptoris n.52)
The point about the State intervening to legislate a floor below which wages must not fall is that, without it, as Churchill observed, the good employer will be undercut by the bad, and the bad by the worst, and "there is no reason why this state of affairs should not continue in a squalid welter which compared with our brief lives is indefinite."
Children, children, be kind to one another and learn to tolerate one another. Otherwise you will have to sit next to one another in purgatory for what will feel like very along time. Be kind|
Actually, I'm sick of standing up for Blair. If he wants to worship in our Cathedral, then he should revere the opinion of our Pope and the faith of the Church, and if he really wants to become a Catholic, he should bear witness to Christ in his political life to profess that faith.
If he thinks the Catholic Cgurch is true, then he should join it. now. If he is unsure then he should remain where he is.
If he is more concered by power than conscience, then he has no place amongst us.
Cherie Blair
"Women still do not get due respect in the Church which is why, in the opinion of many people, it gets some things wrong like its teaching on contraception."
Daily Telegraph 6 June 2005
"In addition to the fringe meetings, and to continue our 75th anniversary celebrations, Cherie Blair helped to cut a special birthday cake at our stand at the Labour Party conference. We also gave away a vibrator to a lucky winner, which got The Observer’s Pendennis in a bit of a spin!"
FPA (Family Planning Association) Archive
To call Cherie Blair a cafeteria Catholic would be bland. She makes a cafeteria look like a North Korean restaurant.
Can all these comments, plus the original piece, be sent to Tony Blair? We all seem to agree with one another but there's not much point in that and it just might do him (and everyone else) some good if he were to read these remarks. Edited, in some cases.
...and a copy sent to Fr Michael Seed and any other priest with whom Blair has contact?
I am sure there is someone at the image consultancy looking at everything on the net that concerns the Leader. Or it could be the intelligence services....
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