Bernard Ingham: Clerics who venerate whingeing above moral responsibility

IT is well over 60 years since I was a regular churchgoer. Like many people, I got out of the habit in my ‘teens. Up to then I had attended Hope Baptist Sunday school in Hebden Bridge from near-infancy at least twice a day.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Roman Catholic Archbishop of WestminsterCardinal Vincent Nichols, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster
Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster

This experience proved that St Francis Xavier was right when he said: “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” It reinforced the teaching from strict but caring parents about the difference between right and wrong, personal responsibility, self-reliance, the virtues of hard work and common decency towards others.

In short, I had a demanding upbringing. It expected something of me. With most of my generation, I tried to respond, too often inadequately. That’s life.

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Or it used to be. I have not been sure for years what the Christian denominations in Britain stand for. This is not just an excuse for failing to practise my basic religion. They seem to be as incapable of setting a clear standard for their flock as they are at defending their faith against a Muslim takeover.

They exhibit an obsessive desire to be at one with an arrogant and trendy Guardianista elite who can find no good bar themselves in our society – especially when the Tories have their hands on the nation’s tiller – and are bent on its destruction.

Hence the clerics’ endless compromises with permissiveness. Their failure 
to lift even the occasional finger against the destruction of the family – the indispensable basis of a cohesive humanity; their indiscriminate indulgence of everyone with a sob story; and their utterly predictable support for campaigners who help to perpetuate problems, if not create them.

Witness the testimony of the founder of the Oxford Food Bank who says there is no evidence – as claimed by the churches – that soaring demand is caused by welfare cutbacks. “If you provide a service, people will use it,” he said. Indeed.

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And so it came to pass that Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, 27 Anglican bishops, 14 chairmen of Methodists districts and two Quakers, apparently backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, tore into the Government’s welfare reforms.

We have of course, been here before. In 1985 an Archbishop of Canterbury Commission published a report Faith in the City that blamed Margaret Thatcher’s policies for growing spiritual and economic poverty in British inner cities.

For my corrective sermon to the modern hierarchies, I shall take as my text the response to Faith in the City by the Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits.

He wrote that his faith’s immediate approach to eradicating poverty “would lay greater emphasis on building up self-respect by encouraging ambition and enterprise from a more demanding and more satisfying work ethic, which is designed to eliminate human idleness and nurture pride in ‘eating the toil of one’s hands’”.

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Against that background, I have the following advice for the prelates.

First, face reality. This is not a poor country. Poverty, as distinct from deprivation, is relative and continually being redefined against average earnings. There is no end to it.

There is no excuse for pleading destitution with a £26,000 a year cap on benefits. In short, Cardinal, the welfare state’s safety net is still there.

Second, show some economic nous. The short route to hurting the honest and deserving poor, as distinct from the professional poor, is a failing economy. We shall not be economically secure as a nation so long as we have a £100bn budget deficit.

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Third, get out of your palaces more and stop embarrassing your laity. A survey has just shown that 52 per cent of Anglicans and 46 per cent of Roman Catholics agree welfare benefits should be cut.

Fourth, stop revealing your arrogant assumption that some people will never be worth anything without generous financial support from the state.

For God’s sake, show them – as Hope Baptists and Chief Rabbi Jakobovits did – that there is a noble route to salvation.

And, fifth, decide what business you are in. Are you just a fully paid up branch of the whinge-to-order poverty lobby constantly demanding more from the taxpayer to support many who could look after themselves?

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Or is your mission to save souls through an inspiring, muscular Christianity that demands discipline, personal responsibility and a contribution to the public good?

As things stand, Iain Duncan Smith has more moral fervour in his little finger than the entire being of a bench of bishops. Women bishops can only improve matters.