10:17am Tuesday 15th December 2009
WE clergy have been told by our ecclesiastical superiors that we must not join the BNP. Well, I wouldn’t join a thuggish gang like the BNP if they gave you free beer and double points on my Tesco Clubcard.
Now, the ban seems to have been extended to Church of England lay people. David North, a member of the BNP and a churchwarden for two terms over the past 15 years at St Thomas of Canterbury, Frisby-on-the Wreake, Leicestershire, says he has been asked to resign from the party.
The Bishop of Leicester denies sacking Mr North – well, not sacking in as many words – but he adds: “Nevertheless, it is a bishop’s duty and responsibility to enable church members to think through issues which may lead to choices of allegiance to be made. It would be difficult to see how any individual could be at the same time a credible representative of both the Christian church and the BNP.” Sacking by any other name.
It’s the selective nature of this ban that annoys me. The church hierarchy doesn’t ban members from joining the Communist Party.
When I was a curate in Oldham, I knew a priest who was a card-carrying member of that party. And, as a school chaplain in Bolton, I attended the same local education authority meetings as another chaplain who was also a communist. The church authorities didn’t seem to care about what influence this bloke might have on the impressionable children in his care.
Left-wing fellow-travellers in the church have always been starry-eyed about communism.
When the murderous policies of such as Stalin – who slaughtered 40 million of his own people – are pointed out, they dismiss this as if it were a mere blemish on an otherwise ideal and principled political system.
Wholesale murder, torture and imprisonment in concentration camps are not accidental to communism: these things are central to its ideology and its very way of conducting its business. Mao, for example, is reckoned by today’s historians to have killed more than 70 million, which makes Stalin look like a lukewarm part-timer.
The perversity and gullibility of some prominent Anglicans is breathtaking. Onetime Dean of Canterbury Hewlett Johnson toured Russia in the Thirties and reported back on how well-fed, healthy and peace-loving the Russian people were compared with the British. This was at the high point of Stalin’s merciless collectivisation of the Soviet farmers, his purges and his starving to death of millions of others in the Gulag.
Even when Russia joined the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany, Johnson, aptly called the Red Dean, continued to support the communists. Unsurprisingly, in 1951 he was awarded the Stalin International Peace Prize – an award as grotesquely incongruous as a Smithfield Butchers’ Medal for the Promotion of Vegetarianism.
Not only did he go undisciplined by his superiors, but he was allowed to continue in his high office and so lend the church’s support to the fascist-communist alliance which was bombing the civilian populations in Poland, Finland and Norway – a conflict in which British soldiers were fighting and dying too.
The BNP is a nasty outfit, but compared with communism’s professionalisation of evil and mass murder it looks like a bunch of sick amateurs.
* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/trade_directory/