Bible sacrilegiously deployed to reject gesture of reaching out
Posted by Jim on June 29, 2018
Letters to Editor. Irish News. Belfast.Published Friday, June 29, 2018.
By Fr Sean McManus, President, Irish National Caucus. Washington DC.
Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975), one of the most eminent English historians, explained how England used the Bible in its genocidal, racist, and – after the English Reformation – anti-Catholic oppression of Ireland.
Sadly, today there is still a residue of that deep-seated anti-Catholic mindset in a significant section of the Protestant community in Northern Ireland. (Can any informed, objective person really deny this?) And – since the six counties were torn away from the other 26 counties of Ireland by the 1920 British Government of Ireland Act – every time any unionist/loyalist/Protestant leader makes a gesture of reaching out to nationalists/republicans/ Catholics, the Bible is sacrilegiously deployed to reject that gesture.
Some might see the latest melancholic example of this as being Ballymoney councillor John Finlay’s over-the-top attack on Arlene Foster’s attendance at the Ulster GAA final.
Was this attack out of concern for the Lord’s Day – which, by the way was changed from Saturday to Sunday by the Catholic Church at the Council of Laodicea in A.D. 364 – or could it be seen as a dog whistle? Might some, with good reason, see Cllr Findlay’s attack as a not too subtle attempt to rally the extreme, fundamentalist, ultra-Orange base of the DUP – to show disrespect not only to Catholics, but also to all things Irish (as personified by the GAA)? Just like Gregory Campbell’s disgraceful attack on the Irish language.
A few misguided individuals may think the best way to counter anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, or anti-Black racism is to ignore it – just don’t acknowledge it and it will disappear. History and human nature prove otherwise. Right now, Blacks in the US quite correctly call out anti-Black racism. And I back them 100 per cent. The same as I back Jewish-Americans who are not silent about some re-emergence of anti-Semitism in the US.
Any time the Word of God is used directly or by dog whistle to cause division and hurt, we can be certain it is not God’s will. As I said recently in a speech at the headquarters of the AFL-CIO (the federation of 55 national and international labor unions that represent 12.5 million working men and women):
“People of faith can be certain that working for justice is doing God’s work on earth. And people of no faith can be certain that working for justice is doing the decent and loving thing. And all of us can be certain that anything that does injustice – anything that marginalises, demeans, devalues and disrespects human beings – cannot be God’s work, or cannot be the decent and loving thing to do.”