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Telegraph Blogs - Holy Smoke - Bishops support book attacking the Pope

Catholic Social Justice, a volume of essays put together by an agency of the Bishops’ Conference, systematically rubbishes Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love). The book has been given a glowing foreword by the Bishop of Plymouth, Christopher Budd.

I haven’t read it, but from what I have gleaned, Deus Caritas Est is, ah, I think an applicable phrase is “well-liked”.

Benedict is accused of taking an ideological position in favour of “the capitalist system and colonialism”.

We are told that the Pope’s views on social justice are “hardly credible” in view of the Church’s historic record of violence, torture and theft. We learn that the Catholic clergy teach that “men are superior to women” because they are more in the image of Christ.

Pope John Paul II is also criticised. According to Fr Tissa Balasuriya, the author of the relevant essay, both John Paul and Benedict lived their lives “in a world dominated by white racism” and therefore could not understand the developing world.

John Paul II, I think, can also be described as “well-liked”.

This judgment has been produced under the aegis of Caritas-social action, an agency of the Bishops’ Conference. In other words, Catholics in the pew have helped pay for an attack on the Pope.

But worst of all, in my opinion, is this passage in Balasuriya’s essay: “The 21st century was born in violence, with the ‘terrorist’ air attack on New York on 11 September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq by the USA, the UK and Australia on 18 March 2003.”

Those inverted commas are despicable. Did the Bishop of Plymouth notice them before he recommended the book in his foreword?

The other essays mostly consist of sub-Marxist drivel. Philomena Cullen, one of the editors, attacks “the ideology of the nuclear family” and endorses “the open family ideology rooted in a feminist perspective”.

Cullen – social policy coordinator of the Bishops’ Conference agency – notes that all dominant ideologies entail the misuse of power, “whether manifested as sexism, racism, disabilism, ageism, hetereosexism”.

Need I go on? How much evidence do Catholics need that the Bishops’ Conference has been hijacked by Left-wing activists working under the patronage of bishops who are in many cases doctrinaire socialists?

Well, either there’s going to be a shake up, or else there are going to be a lot of Evangelical Poles in Britain’s near future.