Entrenched Anti - Catholicisim.

Good grief, events are continualy outstripping my admittedly somewhat jaundiced view of the institutions of this country. Having been astonished at the headline level of coverage to the vaguely defined 'abuse in the Catholic Church ' which clearly wells from a remaining deep seated hostility to said relgion and a desire to discredit it at every opportunity, there has now been an officialy sanctioned memo circulated in the Foreign Office that is almost unbelievable in its highlighting of Anti - Catholic predudice at an institutional level. This insulting, sneering and utterly pointless drivel was the result of a number of Oxford educated and well paid Civil Servants having a ' brainstorming ' session, which I hitherto thought was the advertising industry's way of coming up with inanities to sell things. To call the resulting banalities 'ironic' is a misuse of the word, and since when has the Foreign Office been in the business of irony ? Neither were these excruciating examples of the clear disrespect and inate opposition to the standpoint and moral convictions of the Catholic Church represented by its temporal leader Pope Benedict in any way humourous. These were not jokes, (although again jokes at the expense of Catholics are still not uncommon amoungst contemporary comedians), they were glaringly unfunny, symptomatic of a perverse attitude the shows a fundamental failure to properly consider the Catholic position, rather to ineptly attempt to undermine and trivialise its ideas and traditions.
How much abuse, sexual and physical, has occured in the many absurdly called Public Schools that, no doubt many of these Civil Servants attended, over the preceeding fifty years ?
Or in the many secular institutions for young persons run under the auspices of the State ? Or in the Anglican Church ? Any apologies ? No, it appears that the Catholic Church, a very large organisation made up of individuals with virtues and failings like any other, and could never be completely controlled in every aspect by one person, even if this person is the Pope, is the one and only place that it has occured.
This touches on another misaprehension that the majority and even the more enlightened have in this country, namely that to be a Catholic you have total commitment to and obey every word ever said at any time by the current Pope : WRONG, this is not the case. I was brought up a Catholic, and I seem to recall as much disagreement as agreement with sucsessive Popes and their pronouncements. These had effects, particularly in the way the church services were conducted and the physical fabric of the church buildings, but the idea that one looks to the Pope as the guide to every aspect of being a practicing Catholic was absolutely not the case. Strange as it may seem Catholics make up their own minds and are not controlled by thought beams direct from the Pope's brain in Rome.
During the last year of Tony Blair's Prime Ministership I recall a piece in The Times stating catagoricaly that a Prime Minister could not be a Catholic. I found and still find this deeply disturbing and fundamentaly wrong in the early 21st Century. Being a Catholic does not mean that you swear some sort of blood oath, unlike being a Freemason, and vow to obey to the letter some all powerful authority. It is not a secular activity, it is a faith, it is a council of perfection, not a set of laws, it strives to bring out the better in people, to follow values that are rooted in what is good, and this is a spiritual conviction, assisted by the form and councillors of the church but not controlled by it like a puppet.
In this country with its connection between the state and its church, this is not understood, and this link is, I contend, to the detriment of both its state and its church.