RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

He has been long loathed by leftists and secularists, mercilessly targeted by journalists with childish insults aimed at his person and his faith and with obsessive character assassination that has rightly left many people, Catholic and non-Catholic, doubting that he could ever have got a fair trial; indeed, his conviction on the uncorroborated testimony of a single witness has dangerous implications for all Australians.

Here, in order to dispel the impression fostered in some quarters that Cardinal Pell, who has been vilified perhaps more than any other public figure in Australian history, lacks sympathy for the Jewish People, let’s remind ourselves of a speech he gave in Sydney on 14 May 2001, on the topic”Christians and Jews: The way ahead”:

‘Last night Rabbi David quoted the Jewish saying that after the destruction of the 2nd Temple, the gift of prophecy is dead; so that those who claim to prophesy are either babes or fools. Despite this, both of us have been condemned tonight, to talk on “the way ahead”, but my ambitions are very limited for a number of good reasons. A bishop has to be planning for tomorrow, although Jesus himself told us not to worry too much. Tomorrow can take care of itself, we have worries enough today! And in the Catholic community there are scattered individuals who are so busy preparing for the future that they ignore and neglect today’s responsibilities.

I speak too as one less wise; my normal condition, but in this case without extensive experience of ongoing dialogue, deep theological or sociological discussion on this vexed area of Jewish a Christian relations. 

However I pray the psalms every day, with all other Catholic priests; and I love them. I don’t know how many priests, especially those suffering or in trouble, who have told me how much the psalms have helped them.

In Rome 35 or 36 years ago our lecturer on the Psalms told us they were unique in any literature. 

These were the years of Vatican II and all such claims were greeted sceptically by many students.

I reserved my judgement and during the later years I have read something of the other great religions and found nothing to equal the Psalms as a body of prayerful literature.

I have come to know and love much more deeply the writings of the great prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and especially Ezekiel, the strangest of them all. And I have come lately to study Elijah much more closely. For a long time I didn’t understand his top billing among Jews and Christians and with Jesus himself! Now I believe he is particularly important, and for us now, because monotheism was nearly wiped out then by Jezebel and the prophets of Baal.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/10/28/the-brexit-knot/Britain now faces a great political and constitutional crisis

Being a classicist, Boris Johnson would be familiar with the Gordian knot. But for anybody whose schoolroom memories need refreshing, the knot in question was put in place by Gordius, king of Phrygia. Reputedly only a ruler of Asia would be able to untie the knot — making it a slightly less glamorous version of King Arthur’s sword in the stone. In any case, when confronted by the knot, Alexander the Great is said to have spotted the fast way to undo the problem and simply whacked at it with his sword, so proving that he should become the king of Asia.

If ever there was a fearsome knot in modern politics it is the question of Brexit. Not that the knot was as completely tied in 2016, when the British people were given a straightforward choice. The question the public was then asked was whether it wanted to “remain” in or “leave” the European Union. The public voted by a majority (52 percent to 48 percent) to leave, though it has since appeared that for those who set the question this was the wrong answer. Or at least not the answer that the political class expected the public to select. And so the knot tightened and became ever more knotty with each resulting effort to untie it.

The civil service, it turned out, had not been instructed to prepare for the eventuality of a “leave” vote. Then–prime minister David Cameron and his colleagues may simply have expected the “remain” side to win. Or they may have feared that if word had got out that the civil servants were preparing for the possibility of a “leave” vote then that would have bolstered that side of the campaign. Whatever the reason, on June 24, 2016, Whitehall turned out to be unprepared for what was one of only two possible results.

With Cameron having resigned just hours after that vote, the stunned victors plunged into a bout of fratricide. The lead Brexiteer — Boris Johnson — was politically assassinated by his own leadership-campaign chief, the second most prominent Brexiteer — Michael Gove — who then made an unsuccessful bid for the leadership himself. Unsuccessful because, with the victors in disarray, a path through the middle of the Conservative-party membership (who vote in leadership elections) was created for Theresa May. And so the former home secretary who had given a single half-hearted speech in favor of Remain ended up becoming the Conservative-party leader, the prime minister, and the person responsible for making sure that Britain exited the European Union.