Goodbye To All That

So determined is the Catholic Church to prevent the parliamentary candidacy of the man who wrote this, that it has obtained a court order forbidding me from mentioning the Catholic Church. At all. Ever. So I suppose that this is goodbye.

Almost certainly as the Labour candidate against me, the Church intends to sponsor some abortionist, Christmas only but born into the tribe. That person needs to know that this is now very, very, very personal, indeed. And that I no longer have to turn the other cheek. I might have been the Prodigal Son's brother. But I will not be the fatted calf.

If you can tell me which part of this, this or this, whether or not you happened to agree with it, was contrary to the Magisterium, then please do. "Because I say so" does not cut it from men who only had to be better educated than people who had left school at 14, although they themselves had done so even earlier in order to spend six years praying.

I live in the middle of County Durham and my disability makes me dependent on public transport, so there is no option either of crossing diocesan lines or of attaching myself to some semidetached ghetto. I have only ever been part of one Catholic parish, rather than university chaplaincy, and it is in the village where I have lived for 30 years. I was very active in it until the new, but elderly, priest made it clear that people like me were not Catholics as he had been brought up to understand the word. I have no desire to be in the Church without being fully involved in the life of a parish.

At North West Durham, the Church's favoured son is going to be a man who has racially abused me for most of the present century and who, although he is in his forties, had until very recently never been employed as anything other than a right-wing Labour apparatchik, but who now runs the public relations operation for the bankers to the Colombian and Mexican drug cartels. Although they rarely attend, his relatives have been going around for 17 years saying that they were going to get me out of the Church. That is, when one of them has not been attempting to murder me.

But I may or may not contest North West Durham. Unless I had raised enough money to mount a serious campaign, then I would not be standing for Parliament again at all. And even if I were good for the readies, then I would stand wherever the most people had asked me to do so. There are 650 possibilities for that. Please give generously.