1000 Priest Stand Up

Deo gratias

I don't receive a copy of The Torygraph, but have not failed to notice yet another loving defence of marriage and our religious freedoms on its letters page today. A loving defence signed by a thousand priests, a quarter of the Catholic clergy in the country. People have been swift to dismiss this as bigotry but these 1, 024 men are defending our religious liberties. As the letter itself says

It is meaningless to argue that Catholics and others may still teach their beliefs about marriage in schools and other arenas if they are also expected to uphold the opposite view at the same time.

I got quite emotional reading the letter actually. I felt touched that these people had stood up to be counted on a matter that is really important to every person who will ever love in this country. What it does, in a nutshell, is give the state control over marriage that it has never had before. Marriage existed before the idea of a state and before the idea of a church, we have absolutely no right to decide what it is and is not. I like having a powerful state because it is a good means to promote a just society, but there are plenty of things a government, however powerful it is, simply is not capable of doing. You can tell me a tree is made of plastic till you're blue in the face but I'm not going to beleive you and I'm going to continue telling people it's made of wood. You can tell me two people of the same sex can get married till you're blue in the face but I'm not going to beleive you and I'm going to continue telling people only people of the opposite sex can. Marriage is something. It's not up to us what that something is. I'd like it to be possible for gay couples to get married. Really, I would. But it's not possible and can't be possible because that relationship does not fit in with what marriage is.

I've mentioned in an earlier post that part of being Christian is loving people, be they black, white, funny, boring, nice, nasty, ginger, blond, gay or straight. They're created in God's own image and He loves them. The Catholic Church is very specific too, I've quoted the Catechism's teaching on it (CCC 2358) before too. This isn't about homophobia, it's not even about gay people per se, it's about what marriage is and what marriage is not.


A certain blood crazed ferret has his usual insightful comment on what lies behind these plans. We're in the middle of a slow motion car crash as far as the economy's concerned and the people that hit the accelorator at the moment we hit the wall are in Number 10, they're just starting an argument in the back in the hope that the passengers don't notice.