What secularists can learn from the Catholic Church


 When I was living in Glasgow I never met a black person. I left Glasgow in the 1960's and I knew there were Pakistani immigrants in the city but I never met any. When I arrived in London however and went to Mass on Sunday there were an awful lot of black people. But they were all Catholics. I became a parish visitor to the immigrants and they were mostly Jamaican but a few from St Lucia. WAs it just because I met them in a place of love that I had no difficulty? That certainly was a key. We were all Catholics, we were all children of God. Then I joined a little club called McCarthys Cellar. There I met South African Blacks and one in particular I was really fond of, but race never enters my thoughts. I remember one day going on a Bus outing to Brighton. On the bus I sat beside a young black girl from th Cameroons, she was very black. We got on like a house on fire and I remember us walking hand in hand along Brighton Pier. From the corner of my eye I sa the astonishment in one man's eyes and he almost fell into the water as he leaned back to point us out to his wife. Now outside the Church I had a few jobs and in one I had this experience. It was a large room with desks at which half a dozen people said beside one another. They were all white. One day a black man came to sit down at one of the tables. "So now they have made it in" said one of my colleagues in disgust. I was surprised for he was otherwise a nice chap. But that made me aware that there was a problem. When I moved to my parish in Basingstoke in 1969 I was in an all white parish again. But then around 1990 immigration began and now my parish contains people from India, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Again it brought no problem to me. We were again in a setting of love and they were, as I saw then, my brothers and sisters.. i do not boast just as a catholic, many Protestant denominations show the same love. Yet it is these Christians that are dismissed in all of the hate that is surfacing, as though hate could possibly be a uniting factor. When I was a schoolboy in Scotland, yes there was discrimination on religious grounds but a wise teacher once told the class "Do not make this an excuse when you do not get a job, it could be that you were just not good enough" In other words he was telling us not to make discrimination an excuse for your failures. There are good white people, there are bad white people, there are criminal white people, but there are also good black people, there are bad black people, there are criminal black people. Support the good in any situation, but not the bad. For example in America last year, 19 white men were shot by police and 9 black men. Is anyone marching for the White men.

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