Why, of course morality has no place in politics - From Across the Pond

By Darren Collins
Op/Ed

A few weeks ago the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, chaired by His Eminence Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, published a letter to all Catholics on the subject of the upcoming General Election. Amongst our increasingly secular and areligious society there was quite a furor over it.

In my very first article (https://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=1800) I said that abortion had never been an issue in British politics, but for a short period around a month ago that seemed to have changed. Two things happened, the leader of the opposition party, Michael Howard, declared that (if elected) he would allot time in the next parliament to debate a lowering of the legal age for abortions, from 24 to 20 weeks. This was compounded by the Cardinal's support of this policy (but notably not the Party).

Members of the public, especially the media and rabid secularists, were outraged that the Church would be seen to direct the six million Catholics in the country to vote for a particular party.

More strange than this was the belief held by a shocking number that "morality has no place in politics". I did actually hear a person say this, and I winced at the sheer stupidity of the implications. It was this person's belief that when we mix morality with politics, we get a situation like in America (what they saw as dictatorial Christianity), they failed to realize that when we exclude morality we get a social situation like in Maoist China.

I would like to explore the belief that politics should be amoral. This means that no legislation can be passed to direct people's actions on what is moral; personally, I believe that paedophilia is immoral, does this mean under the circumstances it shouldn't be against the law?

These people are under the repugnant impression that morality is a purely personal affair, not only is this ridiculous you actually find that the people themselves do not truly believe this. To borrow an analogy from Dr. Zacharias, if we were to carve a child on the table in front of them would they simply take a slice? There are laws, there are morals, and when we create a pseudo-dichotomy between these two things only death and anarchy can abound.

To go back to the issue of the letter on the General Election. People complained, moaned, and shouted about the letter when they had not actually read it - (http://www.catholic-ew.org.uk/election/letter.htm)

The letter explicitly stated that it was not the job of the Bishops' Conference to direct the vote of Catholics, since they should decide for themselves using their consciences; the purpose of the publication was to guide Catholics about what they should consider in the election.

When we begin to dream of separating morality and politics we are separating the head of the state from its arms. Without arms the state is neither use, nor ornament. "The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing"- Thomas Jefferson".

Contact

Darren Collins
https://www.catholic.org , GB
Darren Collins - Student,

Email

datrex1@hotmail.com

Keywords

secularism, modernity, morality, politics

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