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PASTOR
GENERAL'S
REPORT,
DECEMBER 13, 1985
PAGE 7
without any clothes on, Mummy?' Didn't it cross her tiny mind
that it wasn't a scene a small child should have been watching
at 7 o'clock at night, let alone when it concerned his own
mother? On Mon day morning the pop presenter on TV-am merrily
introduced a new video say ing that it showed a group called
Blancmange systematically destroying a house.
We then saw
white-faced young men singing what will no doubt be a hit song
as they smashed a jug of flowers against a mirror, wrecked a
room, threw a turkey against a wall.
That's called light
entertaimnent 1 •••
This is just a random selection of events that have become
commonplace in the Britain of today and we' re in danger of
becoming so anaesthetised we're no longer shocked, and God help
us if we're not••••
Meanwhile, Britain's politically active clergy make pronouncements about
social policies and economic iss ues (much the same as the Roman Catholic
bishops in the United States) •
Their clerical views are decidedly
leftist--more government funding, welfare, income redistribution. But as
the DAILY TEL EGRAPH's Paul Johnson Cone of Britain's best journalists)
wrote, Britain's bishops do not expose the sinful causes of the wretched
social conditions that prevail.
Here are excerpts of his article ·The
Wages of Sin,• which appeared in the May 11, 1985, iss ue:
One of the curious things about our very verbal political
bishops is that they appear to have absolutely no sense of
Christian pr iorities.
That is, they pronounce constantly on
matters which are not really of immediate concern to the
episcopate, such as the details of economic policy, while
remaining totally silent on iss ues which are, or certainly
ought to be, their particular prov ince•••• Yet bishops, if they
would on ly stick to their fun damental and traditional role as
custodians of morality, have an important part to play in
reducing economic hardship.
In both the United States and
Britain, the biggest single cause of poverty is the one-parent
family. It is far more important and pervasive in its effects
than unemployment••••
This gigantic social evil, probably the biggest and most
intractable social evil � face today, is itself adirect
product of moral ev il.
These children of teenage girls are
born as a result of fornication.
The circumstances in which
they are conceived and grow up, which make it extremely
unlikely that they will become useful members of societ y, and
more than likely that they will lead lives of deprivation and
misery,
with little education, tenuous and vulnerable
employment or no jobs at all and a strong possibility that they
will become criminals or drug addicts or both, are the
consequence of the def iance of moral laws and contempt for the
institution of marriage.
Now here is an obv ious instance where the churches, and the
bishops in particular, ought to be exerting all their energies
and eloquence to hammer home Christian teaching, which is
directly relevant to this problem. After all, the avoidance of