London, England, Dec 10, 2019 / 06:01 pm (CNA).- Every voter and politician must resist attacks on the right to life, and Catholic politicians must do so as both a human rights matter and as a “fundamental matter of our faith,” Northern Ireland’s Catholic bishops have said ahead of the Dec. 12 U.K. general election.
“We have consistently said that the equal right to life, and love, of a mother and her unborn child is so fundamental to the common good of every society that citizens deserve the fullest participation in the democratic debate about the legislation which governs it,” Northern Ireland’s bishops said Dec. 5.
Northern Ireland’s strong laws against abortion were drastically weakened Oct. 21, under an act of the U.K. Parliament that took effect due to the absence of a ruling executive in the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly.
“This was a tragic day for the unborn children who will now never bless our world with their unique and precious lives,” the bishops said. “It was also a sad day for our local democracy as this draconian Westminster abortion legislation was introduced over the heads of local citizens.”
“The right to life is not given to us by any law or government, and any law that removes this right is unjust and must be resisted by every voter and political representative,” they continued. “For Catholic politicians this is not only a matter of protecting the human right to life but also a fundamental matter of our faith. Voters have a duty to inform themselves on the position of election candidates in respect of their willingness to support and cherish equally the lives of mothers and their unborn children.”
The general election will be the U.K.’s third since 2015. Normally they would be held every five years.
The elections in England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland will determine who will fill a total of 650 parliamentary seats in the House of Commons.
Brexit is a central issue. Prime Minister Boris Johnson hopes the early election will increase the number of Members of Parliament for his Conservative Party, making his Brexit plans easier to achieve.
The Conservative Party currently leads a governing coalition, with confidence and supply from Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. The Conservatives Party has not mentioned abortion in its most recent party platform.
Sinn Fein, a nationalist party putting forward MP candidates in Northern Ireland, backs legal abortion up to 12 weeks into pregnancy. However, its MPs do not take their seats in parliament.
Two U.K. opposition parties, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, have made the full decriminalization of abortion part of their party platforms. Recently, the Liberal Democrats deselected a former MP as a candidate because of his Catholic faith and views on same-sex marriage and abortion.
Party members are required to support these party platform stands on abortion. The move has drawn criticism from Church leaders like Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury.
“As Christians, we must express the gravest concern that a number of political parties have dispensed with considerations of individual conscience making unequivocal manifesto commitments to deny the unborn child the right to life,” Davies said Dec. 5.
“I cannot fail to draw your attention to this further radical assault upon the sanctity of human life, presented as a program for government and the danger of discarding the rights of individual conscience in determining the right to life of the unborn child,” he said.
The bishop asked for prayers for candidates and for “light in making the difficult choices which an election involves.”
Both Catholic and Anglican leaders have criticized the pro-abortion rights party platforms.
Christine Hardman and James Newcombe, who are Church of England bishops, have written an open letter on behalf of the House of Bishops promising the Anglican bishops will “vigorously challenge any attempt to extend abortion provision beyond the current 24-week limit.” Their letter responded to 383 clergy and laity who in their letter to The Times objected to the manifesto promises to decriminalize abortion.
The Catholic Bishops of England and Wales issued a Nov. 29 statement urging voters to consider issues of human rights and the dignity of human life.
The English and Welsh bishops laid out several criteria for voters to consider when choosing their new MPs, foremost of which is respect for human life, including in the womb, and including care for those who are terminally ill and dying “while resisting the false compassion of assisted suicide or euthanasia.”
The fate of Northern Ireland as the United Kingdom prepares to leave the European Union was another major focus of Northern Ireland’s Catholic bishops. They said the outcome of Brexit will have “a significant impact on our fragile peace and on our political, economic and social life.”
“Competent voices are needed to enunciate our concerns and we encourage voters to choose candidates who value positive relationships within and beyond these islands,” they said.
Other topics of the bishops’ letter included welfare reform, housing and homelessness, and human trafficking.
The major significance of the approaching election “brings an even greater responsibility on us, as followers of Jesus, to reflect in a conscientious and informed way on the breadth of issues involved,” the bishops said. They called for prayers for political candidates and respectful discussion about the issues at stake.
The Bishops’ Conference of Scotland also stressed the right to life as fundamental. The bishops’ pre-election message did not endorse any political party or candidate, but said abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia are “always morally unacceptable,” and that all politicians should be urged to resist the decriminalization of abortion, which leads toward abortion on demand for any reason.
The Catholic Parliamentary Office, an agency of the Scottish bishops’ conference, also reports on its website the votes of politicians on several bills, organized by parliamentary constituency.
These votes include the decriminalization of abortion, which the office said would clear the way for “abortion on demand, for any reason, up to birth.” MPs’ votes on a bill to legalize assisted suicide are also recorded, as are how MPs voted on the parliamentary act which imposed permissive abortion laws and same-sex marriage on Northern Ireland.
Distributions of a leaflet version of this information by priests in the Angus area prompted accusations of favoritism towards the local Conservative Party candidate because the leaflets noted the Scottish National Party candidate’s pro-abortion rights stand, the newspaper The National reports.
A spokesman for the Scottish Catholic Church rejected this claim.
“As you will be aware 59 different messages were sent out each one referencing the voting record of the incumbent MP. They show a range of voting behavior and do not indicate support or otherwise for any candidate, rather they offer publicly available information to parishioners on the most fundamental moral issues … addressed in the last parliament,” the spokesman said.
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In my opinion (of an Eastern Orthodox iconographer), that setting an “Eastern Orthodox chapel” in the body of Notre Dame de Paris is odd and superficial. They want it to be a sign of unity – they will achieve a superficial “unity” because they ignore the deep and true unity which is already there.
Eastern Orthodox pilgrims do come to Notre Dame de Paris and pray there, including before the Crown of Thorns. Furthermore, Notre Dame de Paris’s stained glasses are an equivalent of the Orthodox icons, such as a very fine carved wooden screen which depicts the life of Christ (I am not sure if it was returned after the fire). If you go to any museum of the Western Medieval art, you will see multitudes of Western icons – yes, icons. It is not the style that makes an icon but its faithfulness to an accepted iconographic scheme and rendition. Take the works of Duccio for example, or Fra Angelico, or others. They are your icons, the West, you do not need the extremely Eastern looking images to pray.
And so, we already have this unity in the variety of the holy images, both Western and Eastern. The core is one, the iconographic schemes are the same so there is nothing to state here; there is only to make use of what we have. Unfortunately, the West hugely lost an Eastern approach to icons and this is what needs to be recovered, not the stylistically different icons! This would be a step towards true unity, the unified treatment of the holy images (based on the Seventh Ecumenical Council).
About icons, “Take the works of Duccio for example, or Fra Angelico, or others.”
One key difference between eastern icons and Fra Angelico (more so, than Duccio) is the setting of his figures in space, rather than outside of time altogether. The early Renaissance in the West already is marked by a growing slant toward life within space and time, as perfected later in the art of linear perspective—from the eye of the beholder. Even the linear/basilica Church form—as at Notre Dame—is quite different from the symmetrical and domed Greek Cross form of Eastern churches. The Latin form offers an experienced cadence through time and even history—as one moves through the sequence of bays from the baptistry toward the altar at the far end in the liturgical East. While in the East, one remains surrounded by eternity.
To place the form of Eastern icons within the basilican form is a sort of expression of Church unity (which, yes, already exists). But, recalling the time when the five original patriarchates (Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople, and Rome) had not yet differentiated into the Latin and Eastern forms, as between a stylistic focus more on experience within time and the alternative focus more on transcendent eternity beyond time.
The first eventually becomes the eyes of the beholder, the latter remains beheld by the eyes “written” (not merely painted) within the icon.
On a related matter, did cooler heads finally prevail? A couple years into the restoration of Notre Dame there was a flap as to whether the interior should be adulterated to replace (?) side chapels with light shows more in tune with the times. Surely the Eastern icons are a better display of perennial Church unity than such transitory trivialization.
“The first eventually becomes the eyes of the beholder, the latter remains beheld by the eyes “written” (not merely painted) within the icon.”
You mention my “favorite” pseudo-esoteric term “writing” applied to icons. It is a result of a poor translation to English and a desire to make icons and the work of an iconographer very special to the Western viewers. Whoever (most probably Russian immigrants in the US) invented that application, they claimed that icons are “written” because Gospels were “written”; the work “to paint” was too low for icons, etc.
However, the truth is that in Russian language the word “pisAt” (to write) is applied both to “wring the book/letters” and “painting” – painting WHATEVER: a still-life, a portrait, a battle scene, a nude – or an icon. So, the word “pisat” makes no distinction between secular and sacred art. I never use the English word “writing” applied to icons because it is odd and superficial; there is no reason for me to say “I wrote an icon” if I say “someone painted a portrait”.
There is more in the phenomenon of “writing”, unfortunately: some iconographers deliberately use those words and stress the “esoteric” aspect of icon painting when they advertise their “icons writing workshops”. They seduce naïve Westerners into a belief that they can become iconographers after doing, let’s say, 20 hours of learning how to “write” (to copy one icon) and to guild. This “writing” together with nonsense like “real icons must have guided” is nothing else but a profanation of the true sacred art – and a true attitude to it.
To make a total: icons are painted. It is their subject and a proper attitude that makes them sacred, not some odd wording.
You may be interested to read a short piece ‘Icons are not “written”, by “Dr. John Yiannias, Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Virginia. Dr. Yiannias holds a Ph.D. in Early Christian and Byzantine Art from the University of Pittsburgh, and is a leading expert on Orthodox iconography”
https://www.orthodoxhistory.org/2010/06/08/icons-are-not-written/