Saturday 12 November 2011

SOCIAL ACTION

'"One of the reasons that the world is not convinced is, I think, that men believe that the Church, which they confuse with churchmen, teaches a short-range rather than a long-range morality. They hear the adulterer, the thief, and the murderer condemned from our pulpits, but not the the employer of sweated labour, not the shareholder in the armaments factory, not the men who make their money out of films about gangsters, not the politicians who compromise with the perpetrators of cruelty in faraway lands. They argue that, in the eyes of the Church, a man who owns shares in a company which makes its profits through underpaying Chinese coolies is a good Christian so long as he doesn't murder the friend who beats him at golf or cohabit with his parlour maid. We, who are priests, know this is not the teaching of the Church, but can we honestly say that we have taken the trouble to let men of good faith know that is not the teaching of the Church? For, as is evident, many men of good faith remain outside the Church. Is it not for us to ask ourselves if we have not, by condeming only those sins which it takes little courage to chasten, prevented them from finding their way into the Fold which is Christ's?"'
Bruce Marshall, The World, the Flesh and Father Smith, p.134.