Roman Catholic Church’s guide to voting in the next general election
Two articles in the Times today looking at the “Catholic vote”.
Roman Catholic bishops enter pre-election fray
The Roman Catholic Church will wade into the general election campaign next week with a controversial document condemning the loss of virtue in public life.
In their pre-election manifesto, Catholic bishops are expected to take a line that is economically to the left of centre but conservative on social issues such as marriage, education and care for the elderly.
They will argue for the right to religious freedom at a time when secularist campaigning is on the rise as never before. The document will also be interpreted as a warning to the Conservatives that their more liberal attitude to certain social issues, such as homosexuality, threatens to alienate a core block of swing voters in an election where the religious vote is regarded as crucial to the outcome.
In the document, discussed with the Pope when the bishops were in Rome for their ad limina visit earlier this year, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales warn that regulation has replaced virtue in public life. They condemn the substitution of red tape and petty rules for virtue, the loss of trust, the financial collapse, the decimation of social capital, the loss of human dignity in policies on migration, the devastation to the global environment and the repeated attempts to erode religious freedoms in Britain.
Catholic Church voting guide will be claimed by the Tories
It was once famously said that the Anglican Church was the Conservative Party at prayer. If that adage was ever true it abruptly ceased to be in the autumn of 1985. When the Church of England’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas published Faith in the City, a report that blamed the Thatcher Government for spiritual and economic poverty, ministers were incensed.
One Cabinet minister dismissed the report as “pure Marxist theology” and claimed it proved beyond doubt that the Anglican Church was governed by “a load of communist clerics”.
It is unlikely that any Labour minister will react with quite such anger to the publication of the Roman Catholic Church’s guide to voting in the next general election. The document is scrupulously non-partisan in the sense that it endorses no political party. That is wise politics, for the largely Catholic segments of the northern and Scottish cities are almost exclusively Labour areas.
Tags: Christianity, Politics