And Our Hearts Shall Yet Burn

Several years ago, I casually mentioned Saint Patrick's Day to one of this parish's most active teenagers, of solidly County Durham Catholic stock, and he had literally never heard of it. Today, as a daily Mass-goer when possible, I had entirely forgotten about it until I went to church and the septuagenarian pianist (don't worry, we have the organ on Sundays) insisted on having a couple of verses of Hail, Glorious Saint Patrick. Everything else was for Lent, though, and there were no more people than there would have been anyway. The world turns.

Still, Saint Patrick is also the Patron Saint of Nigeria, where they brew a 7.5% ABV Guinness that may now be purchased on these shores, and if Great Britain did not already contain more practising Catholics and active priests who had been born in Nigeria than who had been born in Ireland, then it very soon will. And that is just Nigeria, never mind the whole of Africa, and never mind the entire Global South. Also, that is just Catholics, never mind the Anglicans of whom two thirds in the world were in Africa, and never mind Protestants in general.

The re-Christianisation of Britain will need to be seeded by immigration on a scale that had never previously been contemplated, while protecting and extending the workers' rights and the social provisions that were themselves an expression of Christian principles. Ah, Christian principles. Christian values. Christian heritage. Ask for a definition of any of those from, say, John Cleese of The Life of Brian, the showing of which in schools has contributed very significantly to the de-Christianisation of this country, and continues to cement it.

That is the Britain that he and his fans wish to Restore, in which the Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the Methodist Church all wrote suspiciously similar reports on abortion so that David Steel could write them up as a Bill that they all then supported, in the first case even within the parliamentary process itself. Notice that "the child abuse crisis" in the Catholic Church in Ireland has mysteriously gone away since Ireland acquired abortion laws as liberal as would soon come into effect over here. Once that and assisted suicide were done and dusted, then expect all talk of child abuse in the Catholic and Anglican churches in Britain to go away, too. And if the Archbishop of Canterbury did attend tomorrow's Lords votes on abortion up to birth, then do not assume that she would vote against it. Since the issue became live, so to speak, then with the possible exception of Rowan Williams, none of her predecessors would have done. Or did.