The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Dies Irae

That gifted entertainer, Dr Rowan Williams, who has an invisible friend and believes that a man once rose from the dead, has warned people not to be deceived. As the head of a tolerably wealthy organisation which seeks to improve the country's moral tone via faith-school indoctrination and parliamentary obstruction, he urged Christians to let go their "selfish, controlling, greedy habits". Not for the good of anyone else, of course; but in their own interest, as a preparation for their own death. Meanwhile, the Bishop of Rochester, who recently had a whine about the lack of funding for Christian indoctrination of the sick, the young and the otherwise imprisoned, "urged high earners to share their wealth more generously"; while the Bishop of Lichfield said: "The brave new world where everyone is meant to have choices has proved unworkable without values that come from somewhere", a statement whose profundities I humbly leave for better theologians to plumb.

The Pope, like his most recent namesake Benedict XV, has responded to the massacres of various good souls by various other good souls mainly by wringing his hands. He called for "solutions that will safeguard peace and the common good", citing several of the world's most troubled regions, including Africa where Catholic propaganda has done so much to safeguard the human immunodeficiency virus.

Williams noted "the greed of societies that assume there will always be enough to meet their desires - enough oil, enough power, enough territory". He apparently did not give examples of such greedy, acquisitive, ignorant societies - Christian Spain in the sixteenth century, Christian France and Christian England in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Christian America in the twentieth century - but observed that "we as a culture can't imagine that this civilisation, like all others, will collapse and what we take for granted ... simply can't be sustained indefinitely". There has even been talk of repealing the blasphemy law.

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