Islam, Pagans, Politicians and Parliament

A call to the Catholic Church to save our society.

A sign for our times: - a Christian MP delivers a speech to the House of Commons. The chamber is almost deserted. You would get an immediate impression that this speech was a matter of no importance. The MP doesn’t appear to be a man worth listening to. At least, there is no one taking the trouble to listen to him. Of the six hundred and fifty MP’s only three or four are there. Perhaps he is a political hack, or an incoherent rambling eccentric, tolerated as an MP but ignored and sidelined by all mainstream politicians?

You would be wrong. Very wrong. He is Danny Kruger. Highly respected, intelligent, ethical, moral, and/but Christian. And that may play a part in explaining his being shunned in the chamber.

Yet while his fellow parliamentarians ignored him, the world did not. His speech may have attracted three colleagues in person, but it has been viewed 3.6 million times on his X page, and shared over 10,000 times.

He began by reminding his (world-wide) audience that the debating chamber used to be a chapel.

“The old Chamber of the House of Commons, on which this space was modelled after the great fire of 1834, was St Stephen’s Chapel—formerly a royal church. It was given by the heirs of Henry VIII to Parliament to serve as its debating Chamber. Madam Deputy Speaker, your Chair stands on the altar steps. The Table with the Dispatch Boxes is where the lectern stood.”

There is something poignant, and perhaps containing if not a touch of blasphemy, then or desecration, in the Speaker’s chair replacing an altar. It sets a precedent perhaps for the crushing of the integrity of the Church by the state.

But the desecration Danny Kruger wanted to speak about was not that of a Catholic chapel, but the moral desecration of the body politic (though they are of course, not unconncted.)

He had been in the forefront of leading the opposition to the ‘death bills’ this infamous summer has witnessed.

“Last month, in the space of three days in one infamous week, this House authorised the killing of unborn children—of nine-month-old babies—and it passed a Bill to allow the killing of the elderly and disabled. I describe those laws in those stark terms not to provoke further controversy, but because those are the facts. We gave our consent to the greatest crime: the killing of the weak and most defenceless human beings. It was a great sin.”

The House of Commons is not used to the concept of sin. It may not even understand the concept. But it contains overtones of course of missing a target with the consequence of corruption.

Kruger drew a line connecting the abhorrence of the legislation with the moral chaos and denigration of the national Church and the nation itself.

“It is no surprise that both the Church and the country itself are in a bad way, divided, internally confused and badly led. The Church is riven by deep disputes over doctrine and governance, and is literally leaderless, with even the process of choosing the next Archbishop of Canterbury unclear, confused and contended. The country itself reflects that—unclear in its doctrines and its governance, profoundly precarious, chronically exposed to threats from without and within. It is at risk economically, culturally, socially and, I would say, morally.”

As many of us have been saying, but with almost no recognition in the public square, he warned that the vacuum left by a broken national church and the absence of Christian belief in either parliament of

“Ugly and aggressive new threats are now arising, because we have found that in the absence of the Christian God, we do not have pluralism and tolerance, with everyone being nice to each other in a godless world. All politics is religious, and in abandoning one religion we simply create a space for others to move into as the dominant faiths. There are two religions moving into the space from which Christianity has been ejected”

All this is indisputable and bravely said, since almost no one else in Parliament has dared to say it.

We must salute Danny Kruger and both publicise and honour him.

He offers us a brave, courageous and direct analysis of the quicksand we are in.

But his prognosis can’t be left unexamined, because it is in part mistaken, and so may not help us find a way out.