As Dennis Skinner said, “When posh boys are in trouble, they sack the servants.” And the great Professor Robert Skidelsky FBA, Lord Skidelsky, has passed from our midst. Despite Keir Starmer’s pretence that we were either not in the Iran War or at least not in it all the way, its effects are damaging Britain more than any other major economy, so we have never needed Skidelsky more, and that is saying something.
Instead, we must make do with a sex toys MP called Niblett. Is this a Carry On film? Which of the legendary ensemble cast should play which of today’s politicians, and why? Anything more sophisticatedly satirical would be impossible when Reform UK’s candidate for Lambeth’s Brixton Windrush ward was called Oliver Cromwell Khan.
In anticipation of the local elections, Reform is now in negotiations with Unite to resolve the Birmingham bin strike. The Labour Party is simply and rightly being bypassed. Did Sharon Osbourne ever follow through on her pledge to move to Birmingham and contest Sparkhill? The Conservative Party wanted her as its candidate. Is she a member? At any rate, she has promised to attend Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s Unite the Kingdom rally on 16 May, when both British and foreign speakers will call on Donald Trump to invade this country to effect regime change. Will Kemi Badenoch’s Sharon Osbourne be one of them?
No one seems to be telling Osbourne to say in her lane. They save that for the Pope, about whom Trump has lied directly by claiming that, “The Pope made a statement, he said “Iran can have a nuclear weapon”.” The Pope’s brother’s Illinois home has had to be evacuated after a bomb threat, while the Pope himself teaches, “Jesus told us, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” but woe to those who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic, or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”
The Pope is in Cameroon, where there has been a civil war for nearly nine years. While of course his words have a wider application, they were not immediately addressed to Trump or to his supporters. Still, they have clearly heard them, so let them take them to heart. As Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas tweeted on Wednesday, “Public officials may opine about theology, as is their right. The Successor of Peter teaches. This is his office. If what he teaches doesn’t sound like what we want to hear, we should admit the likelihood that the problem is in what we want to hear, and not in what he teaches.”
The “anything but a definition ex cathedra is just his opinion” school of these things is on the same level as the German Synodal Way, or the attempts to justify the impending entrenchment of the Lefebvrian Schism, or the quotations from Shakespeare in the Book of Mormon because Joseph Smith thought that they were from the Bible, or Pete Hegseth’s quotation from Pulp Fiction on the same misapprehension, which has made some of us feel our age as surely as the forthcoming induction of Oasis into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The “anything but a definition ex cathedra is just his opinion” school of these things is the German Synodal Way, and the attempts to justify the impending entrenchment of the Lefebvrian Schism.
ReplyDelete"Unless it's infallible, it's not binding," along with "only in faith and morals", as if war and peace, or wealth and poverty, were matters neither of faith nor of morals. There is some leeway where the Ordinary Magisterium is concerned. But not very much, and not necessarily for everyone rather than for specialist theologians. It would not apply to the Iran War, anyway. And as for people who think that it is only "morals" if it is somehow connected to sex, as Chesterton said, Freud should be pronounced "Fraud".
DeleteThe Synodal Way represents a breach with Church doctrines on faith and morals-the Pope’s views of foreign policy are not Church doctrines and the Church has never taught anything so ridiculous as that a Pope cannot err even outside of doctrinal matters.
ReplyDeleteI wish that I could say that it was an honour to welcome you, Mr Vice President. But you need to read a book that you did not write.
DeleteIt's too well-written to be Vance but it's still slop. What does this boy (he's very easy to picture) think the Pope does when not defining ex cathedra? Give advice like some agony uncle?
DeleteHe would not even give that advice his obsequium religiosum. He'll be Googling that now.
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