Dear Parishioner,

It’s nice to go to a show when you are on holiday; and nice to see a good performance.  A good performance always enlightens you, usually gives you an insight into the great mystery of life.  While Pwllheli has no theatre such as we have here in Llandudno, I nevertheless had—I won’t say enjoyed—a holiday show, indeed an ongoing holiday show.  Actually, it was a very bad performance, but like most shows it certainly did illustrate life as we live it.  The show, of course, was Parliament and the performance of its “honourable” members.

We elect these men and women to represent us in Parliament, and I actually think they have represented us extremely well!  Not from a political point of view, where I think they have generally represented us poorly; and certainly not from a Catholic point of view, where I think this present Labour administration, including its former leader, has represented the Catholic Church so badly, indeed let the Catholic Church down so badly, that it no longer deserves our support or confidence.

Where I do think this administration has represented us faithfully, (and not only this Labour Government but the rest of them as well), is in the sleazy and grubby way in which they have been behaving with regard to their financial benefits.  There have been some among our Parliamentarians who have steered clear of this exercise in greed, but they appear to have been few and far between.  Equally few and far between would be the ordinary persons living in our midst who would not have done exactly the same.  This is why I say sadly that these politicians do represent us. 

As the side show to my holidays moved to what I considered its middle point, the leaders of the Parties stood up and apologised for what had been revealed by the Telegraph.  A good old fashioned apology is always welcome and always clears the air.  But these apologies were neither good nor old fashioned.  There was as much spin to these acts of contrition as there has been spin on virtually every recent political issue.  So insincere were these admissions of guilt that if they had taken place in the confessional the priest would have had to withhold absolution!

The apology ran thus: It wasn’t the honourable members fault that they helped themselves to all this public money which the tax payer has to foot, no, not their fault at all: it was the fault of the system.  For Brutus was an honourable man!

The next act in the play was for their leaders to get all self-righteous (and competing with one another as to who could be the most so) and demand that the monies be restored to the public purse.  This gave rise to a rash of such shows of self-justification on the part of the offending MPs, that the stomach was quite turned.  As though writing a cheque absolved them totally, leaving no record of the fact that they had already proved themselves to be untrustworthy and therefore unworthy of their leadership role in society!  For “to those to whom much is given, much is expected”, in the words of Our Lord, and “the man who cannot be trusted in little things cannot be trusted in great”.<>

The great British public were incensed, leading to a massive outpouring of typical British hypocrisy.  Hypocrisy on the part of the majority of the citizenship who would have done exactly the same if they had had half the chance, and hypocrisy on the part of the MPs who claimed it was not their fault at all but the system’s. <>

The fault of the system.  Actually it was the fault of the system, but not the system they referred to.  It is our whole social system which has gone wrong.  It has gone wrong because its fundamental constitution has been ignored.  We, our parliamentarians and the vast majority of the public, no longer pay any heed to what God has decreed, our Inventor who knows exactly what is good for us, both individually and socially, and who has given us a law to live by.  Instead, we behave according to our own devices and desires.  Society has substituted the Owner’s Handbook, the Scriptures and the Church, for the simpleton’s “what-suits-me” attitude. 

Today, what is right and wrong for the majority of people is what appears good for them at the moment, what they perceive to be immediately beneficial to them.  So, if you fancy a girl, you have sex with her, for that is what it pleases you to do.  If you conceive a child and it is inconvenient, you abort it, for that is what it pleases you to do.  If you tire of your wife, you divorce her; the fact you vowed before God to stick together through thick and thin is irrelevant, for this is what it now pleases you to do.  If your child prefers Sunday morning football to worshipping God, then let him have his way, for that is what it pleases him to do.  And so on and so forth.
It is only when people think others might find out or disapprove of what they do that they start  to think twice.  This fear of disapproval or punishment is, for very many people, the only rule governing their behaviour.  Do what you like, provided you don’t get found out.  Cheat the tax man, steal, behave loutishly, commit adultery, abuse your wife, drink yourself silly with cheap booze from the supermarket, but do not get found out.  Good on the Telegraph for exposing these Honourable Members of the Mother of all Parliaments for thinking in this way.

These elected members represent us because they are no worse and no better than the average of us.  But better indeed we should be, and better we could be if we realised that morality is not a personal decision of mine, it is something that exists outside of me.  There is a God-given way in which we humans should behave, a way that is strictly for our own real benefit, a way that is revealed to us through our conscience and clarified and confirmed through the Scriptures and the Church.  Our society has lost all sense of this objective morality and we must relearn it.  Good and evil do not depend on what I think, or what I consider to be good for me, or what I can get away with.  The Ten Commandments were cut in stone, remember.  Morality ultimately depends on God, and it is because we as a society have lost sight of Him that we behave in the way we do.  When will we ever learn?  

God bless you,  Fr Antony Jones