Sunday 15 March 2015

Free Speech, Indeed

Radio Four and Newsnight have become wholly owned subsidiaries of the Daily Mail, but BBC Three has not.

No wonder that the Corporation wants to axe the entire channel.

The lengths to which the BBC has gone in order to avoid reporting one of its own programmes have been breathtaking.

It has banged on about kitchens instead for most of the last week.

9 comments:

  1. I'm delighted to see the Society for the Protection of unborn Children hosting the American Right who are so much better than our own tepid bishops (as Peter Hitchens said, who the hell does Vincent Nicholls think he is, telling British people "immigrants are people too"; bore off).

    In a speech in northern England at a conference organized by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and Voice of the Family, Cardinal Burke said that our societies can “no longer be called Christian” and called for a movement of re-evangelization, starting from scratch.

    “In our day, our witness to the splendor of the truth about marriage must be limpid and heroic,” he said. “We must be ready to suffer, as Christians have suffered down the ages, to honor and foster Holy Matrimony.”

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    1. SPUC has been a joke for years. Worse than a joke, in fact. It has gone completely loony under its present Director. People like David Alton all resigned as Patrons of it, oh, a good decade ago now.

      Cardinal Burke has no conceivable following in this country, thank God. Or in his own, come to that. He'd be dangerous if anyone took him seriously. But he dresses to ensure that no one does.

      Next to nobody has ever heard of him. Or ever will.

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  2. Which aspect of Cardinal Burke's statements do you disagree with? Let's see how Catholic you really are.

    The bit about refusing Democrat politicians Holy Communion? Did you know Pope Benedict himself confirmed that pro-abortion politicians must be denied Communion?

    It's all standard-issue Catholic teaching.

    Once again, one has to wonder; why is he suddenly all over the news for simply repeating standard Catholic teaching?

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    1. He is a grandstanding clown, going on about martyrdom and deliberately drawing comparisons between himself and St John Fisher. Thankfully, he is ignored.

      Carrying on with the rump of SPUC only proves that he is figure on the fringe of the fringe. Even its long-serving Director, a Papal Dame, long ago resigned all connection with that. I am still on its mailing list, but I am on a lot of mailing lists, and it has always been something like impossible to leave.

      That Communion business only ever seems to have existed in America. Neither John Paul nor Benedict ever even attempted to enforce it anywhere else.

      Only people on the mailing lists of things like SPUC would ever have heard of it over here, and even we viewed it as the kind of thing that went on over there, "say no more".

      It has a stereotypically American lack of subtlety to it, and Americans are notorious for assuming their own cultural and political peculiarities to be universally normative.

      I mean, just try and imagine it anywhere else, and certainly anywhere in Europe. Well, there you are, then.

      John Paul and Benedict probably just arched their eyebrows and said, "The Americans are different," as cultured Europeans are wont to do.

      But a New World Pope will be having none of that. And doesn't Cardinal Burke know it?

      On topic, please.

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    2. Are you involved with Catholic Voices?

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    3. I am around it, in that I have friends in it. But I am neither Opus Dei nor Oxford, which are its partly overlapping bases, pretty much.

      It is interesting that something with such roots is broadly (not entirely, but broadly) Old and Blue Labour, including a fairly recent Lord Mayor of Oxford who remains a Councillor in, as people are often surprised to learn, that rather Old Labour city.

      The top and bottom is that you can only be in so much.

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    4. The last two indulged that kind of American because they were Central European intellectuals who assumed the British hardly read and the Americans hardly could. At any rate Britons who hardly read and Americans who hardly could had to be forgiven, look what they had grown up with. But there is none of that from an Argentinian.

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    5. They tried it in Mexico but the point still stands, the idea of it in Europe is laughable. Francis though is understandably not of the view that mere colonials are expected to be as unsophisticated as they please. Nor is he sympathetic towards an elderly Irish-American priest who wonders why nobody licks his boots like they used to.

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    6. Remember, if you are an elderly Irish-American priest, then nobody's licking your boots like they used to is called "persecution".

      Good points about the fact that this Pope, being from the Americas, holds them to the same standards as Regensburg or Lublin, whether they like it or not.

      But this thread is now hopelessly off-topic.

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