CHRISTIANS, PERSECUTED crime. After the murders (in the event he has to kill her half-sister as well) he finds, like the doctor, that he feels ill, he can't think, he can't function and he avoids his mother and sister. Indeed, we come back to Adam and Eve in Genesis. After they stole the apple, they hid from the Lord God and were cast out of the paradisal Garden. Thus runs the argument that sin is in reality bad for you, and leads to illness. You can also begin from the other side and consider illness first. Is it always a bad thing? I remember another homily at another Mass that addressed this. I forget the context and the readings of the day, but the priest said that the Lord might not always send us good
things. Sometimes he might send us difficulties; sometimes he might allow us to become ill, for example, but it might be for the greater good that we become ill. This struck me as sensational because in the world of healthcare to say this is heresy; illness is the universal enemy and always bad. No one would question that maxim. Yet the priest said that illness might be sent for the greater good. It happened that I left the church at the same time as he did, and I ventured to say that I liked his homily. I caught him by surprise and I saw for a moment that he was pleased. But that wasn't the right thing to say. I should have said why I liked it. For myself,
I think it possible that an illness can save someone from a blindly unhappy life, and can bring a sense of meaning, a clearing of the way. Sometimes families can be brought together, love expressed, at the bedside of a gravely ill patient. Looking again to literature, Dickens has many of his male characters pass through illness as a sort of redemption before they get the girl, and live on happily in wedded bliss. Dick Swiveller in The Old Curiosity Shop, Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend (though he, plot-spoiler-alert, has to be nursed back from a lifethreatening murder attempt) and Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit are three such figures.
What is our Government’s Attitude? Philip Mountstephen is the Anglican Bishop of Truro, who last year led an Enquiry into the persecution of Christians worldwide and the attitudes of the UK Government towards it. He spoke about the experience and his findings to the Catholic Union and here he introduces his talk, the main content of which will appear in the next editions of Oremus. I had an unusual start to my Christmas last year when I was rung up by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who asked me if I’d be willing to lead a review of the way the Foreign Office, the FCO, had addressed or otherwise – the persecution of Christians. It became clear that this was a request from the Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, himself, who was very moved by the issue and clearly concerned both about the human stories of those caught up in persecution, and worried too that the FCO, frankly, just wasn’t doing enough about it. To be honest it was terrible timing for me, not having even started in Truro, but it's a really important issue too, so I said yes. And so we set up the Review, with a punishing six-month window in which to report. In the UK in recent years we’ve had some huge judicially led Public Inquiries, such as Savile, Leveson and Chilcot – but this was definitely not one of those. If they were full MRI and CAT scans, then we had a thumb and a thermometer: we have taken the temperature, we March 2020
Oremus
have felt the pulse. But actually, as doctors know, you can tell a lot just by doing that and while I wouldn’t go to the stake over every jot and tittle of the report I am nonetheless confident in the broad thrust of our conclusion and our recommendations. But why was it needed? Over five years ago The Times published an editorial entitled Spectators at the Carnage. It began like this: ‘Across the globe, in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, Christians are being bullied, arrested, jailed, expelled and executed. Christianity is by most calculations the most persecuted religion of modern times. Yet Western politicians until now have been reluctant to speak out in support of Christians in peril.’ Well, happily, Jeremy Hunt was willing to speak out, and so we set the Review up. In some ways it seems as if the persecution of Christians has come out of clear blue sky. It was a real issue in the days of the Cold War when Christians and Churches in some contexts in the Soviet bloc experienced significant pressure. Post-1989, however, it
seemed to recede – only to creep up on us by degrees in the intervening period. There are two striking factors behind its re-emergence. First, where once it seemed only to be located behind the Iron Curtain, it has re-emerged now as a truly global phenomenon. But it is not a single global phenomenon: it has multiple triggers and drivers.The second striking factor is that because the reemergence of Christian persecution has been gradual, and has lacked a single driver, it has to some significant extent been overlooked in the West. And the Western response (or otherwise) has been tinged by a certain post-Christian bewilderment, if not embarrassment, about matters of faith, and a consequent failure to grasp how for the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants faith is crucial to how they see themselves and to how they behave. Faith and belief are simply not a leisure pursuit as we see it thought in this country, but are fundamental markers of identity, both individual and communal. 29
