As leader of the British
Labour Party Mr Jeremy Corbyn will have a difficult job but it will be one of
those curious jobs that, whether he wins or loses, he can
come out of it with more dignity than any number of winners. We have
seen the steady dismantling of almost everything we thought we had won since
the end of the second world war. Torture now
made respectable by governments, in America
and Britain
for instance, who are saying openly and almost without opposition that torture
is all right if it produces results. It produces horrible results but one of
the things we have lost is that comforting pretence governments used to make of
being appalled by such violence. Now they admit they are not.
And death as a solution to
problems, that idea has flourished while public declarations of respect for
life fade further and further out of our public conscience.
Jeremy Corbyn says nuclear weapons do not solve problems and
therefore we should stop having them. If
governments believe death solves problems then presumably they think the more
deaths the better to solve each particular problem. The only solution to
nuclear mass destruction is to stop producing nuclear weapons and get rid of
those we have. We humans never created a weapon yet that we did not use, ever since
we discovered how to put a sharp edge on a stone. So we have to tell governments,
As long as you have them you’ll use them, so stop collecting them.
People used to fall out about
such things – famously, Bruce Kent in London
fell out with his Archbishop, Cardinal Hume. Bruce who had been in the British Navy did not want nuclear weapons at any price, while
Hume , one time member of St Benedict’s peaceful religious order, approved of
them as, he said , a deterrent. A deterrent to wipe out whole populations. Perhaps
Jeremy Corbyn will start people arguing about that again.
The Churches were and still
are split on this, as on most other issues of public safety and dignity, so
effective leadership is desperately needed there – but churches tend to join in our disputes
rather than heal them.
What Pope Francis said
recently in America
was interesting. Interesting because he dared to address the very problems political assemblies over
there are presenting to mankind – continuous war as government policy, war as a
business, destruction of the environment as a way of making not money but more
money, creating hunger for profit,
reducing respect for life and for what sustains it.
That the Pope addressed these
things knowing that he was putting a needle into the heart of the lion was
refreshing for us Ancients who realise
that just because an institution is two thousand years old that does not mean it will dispense two thousand
years of wisdom. We Ancients though can
hope that a pope even as Ancient as Francis has a lot of wise things to
say to new generations who think old
fellows are just children twice over ,”dis paides oi gerontes”. People who listen to John Kerry , President
Obama and other powerful people may well reflect that the Pope may not have any
battalions behind him but he has millions of people behind him and the
multitudes people saw on the streets of America gave them a demonstration of how large their
number may be. With as many people as that going in one direction governments
cannot afford to be seen going in the other.
Government and people in the USA
obviously want the Pope to be on their side. One way to achieve that is for
them to get on his side on these issues of life and death. Sooner or later the millions on the streets
will send the message: governments come and governments go, but the human will
to be free, secure and full of dignity
will last – literally – for ever.
And if they think the
multitudes in the streets and in the hills don’t matter, they may be reminded that it was the multitudes,
the people, the people of God who were given the Christ message of justice, dignity and life in the first place. So Pope Francis seems
to know where to find it now.
