Catholics Driven from their Homes by the State
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| A lady stands in solidarity with the Crucified... |
For £20 million, perhaps the local authority could have found other land for them. They could have just given them £50,000 to buy a plot of land and let them get on with it, couldn't they?
There are days when reading The Telegraph just makes you want to take out a subscription to The Guardian. This was one of those days. I'm sure if the economic crisis got really bad and homeowners couldn't keep up on their mortgages and a significant proportion of the 'law abiding majority' found themselves in tents, caravans and vans, they'd soon have a different perspective on the draconian application of planning regulations by local authorities, but until that day, cruel prejudice and a rather dark human mode of justice will doubtless prevail.
Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith's blog post for The Catholic Herald today is short, sweet and to the point. There has been a lot of vitriolic nonsense directed towards the activists who campaigned for the gypsy community at Dale Farm. Personally, I'd have thought anyone who stood up in defense of these marginalised, misunderstood and often despised Catholic families who actually take Christ's teachings very seriously would be highly esteemed in Our Blessed Lord's eyes, but there we go.
Comments
That's like saying that if someone dies then it is bad, but the fact that it was your immediate family is just irrelevant.
I dare say we've had hundreds of families travel and stay near us over the decades - and even though I'm willing to provide every excuse, equivocation and mitigation with the broadest of latitude to their lot - your romantic hyper-idealised version of their lifestyles [a Taize cum ballykissangel paradigm] is really distant from the truth.
You've spent a long time with the homeless and the drug addicts and the dispossessed near you - you know that with personal disorder also comes a hazing of the moral one too. I won't go into details on here but criminality, violence, intimidation and endemic prostituion [of both sexes at ALL - and I do mean all- ages] were common phenomena. You know I would make every and any attempt to always side with the underdog and the victim and despise all forms of bigotry and prejudice - but the way you have depicted the Dale farm set up is very, very distant from the reality - I'm not a NIMBY nor do I justify any council moving on 'undesirables' who merely live in a different way; and in no way do I condone police tactics and violent assaults against them. But you envisaging them as all sitting round the campfire with their hedgehog stew saying the rosary and singing the fields of athenrye is not helping. For some of those women and kids their lives are hell - for some of the men their souls are drained from them being forced to emulate an expected figurehead coerced into acting in a certain way and being involved in undesirable activities. Caritas in Veritate dude. x
She looks like the kind of muslim I would get on with.