Jun

15

British Government Without a Compass

June 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Report Criticizes Policies on Churches, Welfare

By Father John Flynn, LC

The British government is failing parts of civil society due to its lack of understanding of religion. This accusation came in a report prepared for the Church of England by the Von Hügel Institute, a research center at Cambridge University.

Details of the report, “Moral, But No Compass — Government, Church, and the Future of Welfare,” were contained in a June 9 press release by the Anglican Communion.

The report draws on a large number of interviews with people from politics, churches, other faiths, the civil service and the volunteer sector. “We encountered on the part of government,” the report says, “a significant lack of understanding of, or interest in, the Church of England’s current or potential contribution in the public sphere.”

The report also accused the Charity Commission for very weak data and systems of classification. Combined with a deliberate emphasis on minority communities, this resulted in a relative exclusion of the Anglican Communion and hundreds of other charities. The researchers concluded that the government is critically underestimating the number of Christian charities to the tune of thousands, and consequently their social, economic and civic impact and potential.

A commentary on the report, published June 7 by the Times newspaper, noted that the research revealed that more than 50,000 Anglican churchgoers are regularly involved in church-backed social action.

The Anglican church wants recognition for this, and where appropriate, government funding. The Times article observed, however, that this has now become a problem due to new guidelines of the Charity Commission.

Church decline

The report comes at a time when recent data points to a worrying situation for the established churches in Britain. According to an article published by the Times on May 8, numbers of Christians attending church is declining fast.

An analysis published by Christian Research, whose numbers were challenged by Lynda Barley, the head of research for the Church of England, shows that by 2050 the number of Muslims attending religious services on a regular basis will be superior to those going to all the Christian churches. By mid-century there will be 2,660,000 active Muslims in Britain — nearly three times the number of Sunday churchgoers, according to the forecast.

Shortly after, a May 11 article published by the Telegraph newspaper reported that Britain could lose up to a fifth of its churches in the space of a generation. The number of churches is forecast to fall from 48,500 now, to only 39,200 in 2030, according to the article.

Sidelining religion

The dire forecasts about the future of Christianity in Britain are only the latest in a series of warnings about the danger the country is facing due to its increasing secularization and the sidelining of religion. The June 6 issue of the Catholic Herald newspaper reported that the adoption agency of the Salford diocese is about to close, due to a law requiring them to give children for adoption to same-sex couples.

The Catholic Children’s Rescue Society has provided an adoption service since its foundation in 1886.

“The government will rue the day when it pursued this line of action. It smacks of a secular attack on the Catholic Church,” said Jim Dobbin, the Member of Parliament for Heywood and Middleton.

Religious-based adoption agencies will shortly be obliged to give children to same-sex couples due to the Sexual Orientation Regulations that were introduced under the Equality Act 2006 to ban discrimination against homosexuals.

In a March 21 article published in the Telegraph newspaper, Peter Mullen, the Anglican rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in London, warned that not enough is being done in Britain to preserve its culture and traditions.

“We imagine we can ditch Christianity and yet the good things we have inherited in our way of life will continue,” he commented. “They will not. Christianity formed Western civilization and is so consubstantial with it that if Christianity goes, the lot goes with it,” according to Mullen.

Improve dialogue

The archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, also spoke recently on the theme of religious values and secular society. In a lecture at Westminster Cathedral, he called for improved dialogue between believers and nonbelievers.

The cardinal commented that in Britain today, there is considerable spiritual homelessness, with people being in a sort of exile from the experience of faith.

“To some extent this is the effect of the privatization of religion today: Religion comes to be treated as a matter of personal need rather than as a truth that makes an unavoidable claim on us,” he observed.

Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor noted that only a modern person would think that religion is a private matter, because according to the tradition of Catholicism, our Christian belief is something profoundly social.

The first commandment to love God is linked to the second one of loving our neighbor, the prelate added, so clearly Christianity is oriented toward public involvement and making its presence felt in society.

“Our life together in Britain cannot be a God-free zone and we must not allow Britain to become a world devoid of religious faith and its powerful contribution to the common good,” the archbishop of Westminster argued.

In part, the attempts to marginalize Christianity stem from the inability by some to cope with the idea that Christianity can be intelligent and not divided from rational inquiry. In fact, the Catholic tradition, explained Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, is characterized by a close relationship between reasoned understanding and religious faith.

He argued that while the Christian faith is not on the conclusions of reason, it is nevertheless compatible with reasoned thought.

The cardinal referred to words of Pope Paul VI who said, “The split between the Gospel and culture is undoubtedly the tragedy of our time.”

Faced with this situation, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor said, “Even in a culture that seems far from God, no one is without God’s presence and action.” Therefore, he continued, both believers and nonbelievers need to recognize and understand each other better, more accurately, more appreciatively.

Not private

Benedict XVI commented on the importance of faith in a secular world in his May 29 address to the Italian bishops gathered in general assembly. It is necessary, the Pontiff urged, to resist the pressures to consider religion, and in particular Christianity, as only a private concern.

“The prospects that are born from our faith can offer, instead, a fundamental contribution to the clarification and to the resolution of the major social and moral problems of Italy and Europe today,” the Pope commented.

He referred to the importance of the work of the Church in such areas as education and the family, at a time when society is marked by an aggressive relativism that weakens the hopes engendered by the values and certainties of faith.

Benedict XVI recommended that the Church in Italy continue its efforts in the midst of “a culture that puts God in parentheses and that discourages every really committed choice and especially definitive choices, to privilege instead, in the various milieus of life, the affirmation of self and immediate satisfactions.”

The Pope concluded by saying that the Church has before it the opportunity to enter into the public debate on the concerns of modern society in a spirit of sincere sharing. A sharing that can only enrich society as a whole, if only the governing elites are prepared to let Christianity have a space in the public square.

Courtesy Zenit.org


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