Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has said Pope Benedict XVI’s attack on the Government’s equality legislation should be taken seriously.
Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has said Pope Benedict XVI’s attack on the Government’s equality legislation should be taken seriously.
Writing in The Times on Wednesday, Mr Sacks said: “We may not agree with the Vatican line on homosexuality. But the State is trampling on our rights as individuals.”
The Pope told bishops from England and Wales that the Government’s equality legislation had served to “impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs”.
His attack came a few days after Church of England bishops in the House of Lords helped to vote down an amendment that would have narrowed the exemptions for religious organisations in existing equality employment laws.
Mr Sacks said he did not believe religious beliefs were entitled to privileged status in a democratic society but warned that using the ideology of human rights to “assault” religion risked “undermining the very foundation of human rights themselves”.
“There are times when human rights become human wrongs. This happens when rights become more than a defence of human dignity, which is their proper sphere, and become instead a political ideology, relentlessly trampling down everything in their path,” he said.
“This is happening increasingly in Britain, and it is why the Pope’s protest against the Equality Bill, whether we agree with it or not, should be taken seriously.”
He said the dismissal of a nurse for offering to pray for a patient, the closure of Roman Catholic adoption agencies for refusing to place children with same-sex couples, and the branding of a Jewish school’s admissions policy as racist were evidence that Britain was entering “dangerous territory” over human rights.
“When Christians, Jews and others feel that the ideology of human rights is threatening their freedoms of association and religious practice, a tension is set in motion that is not healthy for society, freedom or Britain,” he said.
“Rather than regard the Pope’s remarks as an inappropriate intervention, we should use them to launch an honest debate on where to draw the line between our freedom as individuals and our freedom as members of communities of faith. One should not be purchased at the cost of the other.”
Cranmer has provided a very good analysis and synopsis of reactions to the Pope’s comment:-
If you have stumbled onto this blog and are not a Christian, get yourself a hot drink, pull up a comfy chair and then tuck into the following article written by one of the best in the business:- All Of Grace by Charles SpurgeonCranmer has been asked to comment on the ‘Ad limina’ address of Pope Benedict XVI to the 35 assembled bishops and archbishops of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, in which His Holiness was perceived to criticise the legislative programme of Her Majesty’s Government.
His Grace has already attempted to do this, but manifestly failed miserably. He was accused of being inter alia ‘too clever’, ‘pompous’, ‘conceited’, blah, blah, blah (though not [yet] ‘bigoted’, ‘creepy’, ‘yucky’ or ‘disgusting’): the usual diatribe of puerile ad hominem vitriol which tends to be deployed by those who are either incapable of comprehension or unwilling to engage with the argument (or both).
Firstly, it would help to understand precisely what the Pope said, for the true account will not be found within the pathological distortions of the mainstream news media. When one is acquainted with the Pope’s perception of many of his 35 bishops and archbishops in Eccleston Square, it becomes evident that his ‘attack’ was not so much upon the UK’s anti-Christian Labour Government as it was upon his own recalcitrant bishops’ lack of unity, their obstinate reluctance to implement his reforms, and their stubborn refusal to be subject to the Magisterium and adhere to traditional orthodoxy.
And his speech concerned ‘natural law’, though few journalists have mentioned it, and of those who did there is apparently little understanding of the term or of how it relates to issues of justice.
What has been read by most commentators as a high-handed, interfering papal condemnation of the secularist-humanist-equality-obsessed politicians in Her Majesty’s Government was more a humble and wholly-justified rebuke to the ecumenical-relativist-perpetually-compromising bishops and priests in the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales.
And yet the media narrative has been dominated by Harriet Harman’s ‘Equality Bill’, and she has not helped herself by the timing of her spectacular (cowardly and utterly disappointing) climb-down. After all, either she believes in ‘equality’ or she does not: if she does, why has she not pushed this Bill through Parliament irrespective of the will of the Lords, as Labour have done on so many occasions for far more trivial bills? Does the banning of hunting with hounds really merit the deployment of the Parliament Act more than ensuring the inviolable rights of women or homosexuals?
Ms Harman, is the fox’s right to life worth more than gay equality?
Tags: Christianity, News, Politics