UNITED KINGDOM
National Secular Society
By Terry Sanderson
The Catholic Church is in crisis, and not a moment before time. The level of arrogant politicisation to which it aspired under the papacy of Joseph Ratzinger was appalling.
Not that such interference in secular politics has stopped. Only this week we read that the Catholic bishops in Northern Ireland are rushing to support new restrictions on abortion in the province, where the law is already severe by most European standards. And in thePhilippines a huge tarpaulin has been erected over the front of a cathedral naming politicians who didn’t vote in the way the Church wanted them to, and advising worshippers in turn not to vote for them in elections.
Now Cardinal Keith O’Brien,Britain’s most senior Catholic cleric and one of the most prominent opponents of same-sex marriage, has been brought low over “inappropriate behaviour”. His own cruel and overblown rhetoric is now catching up with him and intensifying his humiliation. The hatred that he heaped on the gay community because it dared to aspire to equality turns out to have been just a cover for his own, unresisted, sexual impulses.
So what will the Catholic Church do now? Will the new pope see sense and accept that the world has moved on and that his Church must move on too, if it is to retain any relevance. Will he accept that many of its teachings are impractical, unheeded and despised?
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