London, England, Sep 14, 2017 / 12:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- It’s a tough time for Catholics in public life, and not just in the United States.
Last week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) grilled Catholic lawyer Amy Coney Barrett on her religious views during a hearing for her nomination as a federal circuit court judge, in a line of questioning that “smacks of the worst sort of anti-Catholic bigotry,” theologian Dr. Chad Pecknold told CNA Sept. 6.
Across the pond, a Catholic member of Parliament in the U.K. faced his own round of hostile questions, during an interview on the morning show Good Morning Britain.
After a brief question about immigration and Brexit, hosts Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid vigorously interrogated Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg on his views on same-sex marriage and abortion, both of which are legal in the U.K. The MP is seen by some as a potential Conservative Party leader and even a possible future prime minister.
When repeatedly asked about his views on same-sex marriage, Rees-Mogg responded that he supports the teaching of the Catholic Church, and that the teaching is “completely clear.”
Continually grilled about both this issue and then about abortion, Rees-Mogg noted that while he opposes same-sex marriage and abortion on moral grounds, he equally follows the teaching of the Church not to judge others. He also noted that the laws of the land will not change due to his religious beliefs, because liberal Democrats comprise Parliament’s majority.
“None of these issues are party-political, they are issues that are decided by Parliament on free votes,” Rees-Mogg said. “They are not determined by the Prime Minister, there’s no question of these laws being changed. There would not be a majority in the House of Commons for that.”
Morgan then asks Rees-Mogg if the people could accept a leader with Catholic religious views.
“I think the Conservatives are much more tolerant of religious faith, and so they should be,” Rees-Mogg said.
“It’s all very well to say we live in a multicultural country, until you’re a Christian, until you hold the traditional views of the Catholic Church,” he added. “And that seems to be fundamentally wrong. People are entitled to hold these views, but also the Democratic majority is entitled to have the laws of the land as they are, which do not go with the teaching of the Catholic Church and will not go with the teaching of the Catholic Church.”
Numerous Catholic leaders applauded the British MP’s public witness to his faith.
“Well done Jacob Rees-Mogg! Thank you so much for standing up for Catholics and clearly yet gently proclaiming the teaching of Christ,” tweeted Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth.
Luke Coppen, editor of the Catholic Herald, told CNA in e-mail comments that this is not the first time Catholic politicians in the UK have experience such antagonism.
“Hostility towards Catholicism is nothing new in Britain. Indeed, it is nothing now compared to what it was in the Elizabethan era,” during which it was illegal – and often fatal – to be Catholic, Coppen noted.
Rather than being frightened by the friction that faith and politics sometimes bring, faithful Catholics should continue to serve in the public sphere, Coppen said.
“They are an example to us: we should always seek to serve the wider society because our faith obliges us to,” he said.
Some have even compared Rees-Mogg’s witness to that of St. Thomas More, who opposed King Henry VIII’s remarriage after failing to secure a decree of nullity, and his ploy to break from Rome and become the leader of the Church of England. His faithfulness to the Church cost him his life, and St. Thomas More is often invoked as a patron saint of religious freedom.
“In this week’s magazine we have a headline describing Rees-Mogg as ‘the Thomas More of breakfast television,’” Coppen said.
“That’s tongue in cheek, of course, because he was very brave. But he’s unlikely to be executed,” he noted, though Catholics in public life “may no longer receive invitations to certain dinner parties.”
Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury also praised Rees-Mogg’s remarks, and also encouraged Catholics to continue to be active, faithful participants in the public sphere.
“…beyond the immediate furore I am sure public figures like Jacob Rees-Mogg will ultimately be respected for their courage and integrity,” he told CNA.
“I am sure we need to see greater Christian witness in political life rather than a withdrawal of faithful Catholics from the public square and from the public debates of our time. The challenge faced by Christians today allows us to see more clearly why Saint Thomas More was made a patron saint for statesmen.”
[…]
Yes, to the genius of women…Helena, the mother of Constantine I and who discovered the True Cross; Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel; Margaret Thatcher, the long-serving prime minister of the British Empire…
and now this: Mazzucato, an economist on the Pontifical Academy for Life (Life!).
But what else can you do for a living member? Margaret Sanger is dead!
Don’t think I have the stamina to read this report.
The Holy Father often tells us quite directly where he stands on a given issue. On other occasions, we have to read what he does (e.g. his recent appointments to the PAL) and what he fails to do (e.g. condemn the legalization of abortion in Argentina a few years ago) to know where his head and heart are. He simply cannot come right out and tell us in plain language that he favors “a woman’s right to choose” as that might cause some difficulties with even our laid-back hierarchy, so he needs to speak by his actions, while maintaining some maintaining some plausible deniability. By now, I bet he has tired of trotting out the shopworn “abortion is like hiring a hitman” analogy” and wants to go beyond it. He is, and from the beginning has been, trying to send us a message. Are we listening?
Sending us a message?
He is a mime performing in front of a blind audience.
Something fundamental is missing if all PF can do is dance, nod, wink and smile.
He is the seventh pontiff i have had during my lifetime.
Of those who served in the Chair of Saint Peter, all of them preceding PF displayed absolutely no ambiguity in communicating with his global sheepfold.
What kinship does he have with the church?
Bergoglio should hang his head in shame for destroying the PAL. A future Pope should simply disband the institution as it has been corrupted beyond recognition.
The train wreck pontificate continues unabated.
This report contains a mass of propositions that were being thrown about already in the 20th Century in local situations. The idea here seems to be that they are truly universal and should be established for the 21st Century, proof of which being (would be) that they are announced by the Pope and sealed in a kind of rapture in joy, brotherhood and unity. Apparently what was blocking them until now is “not going deep into shame”; and this “not going deep” and/or “shame” warrants to be resolved for the 21st Century and to be “more than local”?
In my experience of these things in my local situation, in the late part of the 20th Century, the proponents in the setting were Freemasons and Rosicrucians, who were very concrete, very non-formalist and very nesting. Is this report the answer to these types of problems too?
The headline reads that the abortionista is outwardly upheld and praised; and yes, I have seen such things happen before as well during in the 20th Century. Cardinal Kasper had said something about the rising of “a southern wind” and this makes complete sense when applied to my particular Church and my experience of it in the 20th Century. Again in the 20th Century I witnessed the joining of the issue of “women” to coddling of abortion, as if it must be so and only so.
What was local and isolated in the 20th Century, it seems must become ubiquitous for the 21st?
There is a possibility that the report is not of an actual dialogue with the Pope but the result of written questions answered by a ghost-writer and presented as THE on-flight presser.
I wonder how the report would have read had it included the pro-life position and culture though. It seems to stretch out the Holy Father’s first words to make a picture of someone else’s spectrums.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2013/03/13/pope-francis-first-words-let-us-pray-for-the-whole-world-that-there-might-be-a-great-sense-of-brotherhood/
Taking up with something to give it an importance it does not have, a wrong kind of emphasis, a repacking of obligation – is not faith. Inevitably it carries with it a negation of hope -somewhere, somehow. And in both faith and hope, it is a blocking up of love.
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2022-11/pope-flight-three-wars-century-pacifist-interview-bahrain.html
“And now, I put on the family council Mazzucato, who is a great economist from the United States, to give a little more humanity to this,”
Just the thought of Pope Francis, with his “family council”, down at the abortion mill crushing little children’s heads and cutting them to pieces alive, while the children are silently screaming, for the sake of his ‘humanitarianism’, makes me dreadfully ill.
What the hell!