
News from around the Archdiocese of Liverpool
LIVERPOOL CATHEDRAL CELEBRATING 50 YEARS
- A LOOK BACK AT OUR COMMEMORATIVE ISSUE
The world is digesting the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator. Horror stories about the treatment of those who expressed dissent are emerging.
I’m reminded of the Chinese proverb that says, ‘If you wait on the riverbank long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.’
In fleeing to Moscow, Assad escaped the fate of another dictator, former Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu. On Christmas Day 1989, he and his wife Elena were hastily executed after being found guilty of several crimes, including genocide, in a show trial. I wonder at the fate of Vladimir Putin when his time comes.
That said, disillusionment with democracy is spreading. Countries are electing populist leaders across the globe. Dictators woo the electorate but then take steps to consolidate their power. Mock trials are a feature of dictatorships. They suppress dissent from rival political parties and subvert the judiciary to silence them, ‘the enemy within’. Convicted violent criminals are released in Russia to fight in Ukraine while politicians whose only ‘crime’ is dissent are arrested, tortured, paraded in show trials, and left to rot in prison or worse. Democracy, for all its faults, allows those with conflicting ideologies to live alongside each other in peace. If elected heads of state choose authoritarian policies, they pay the price at the next election. We don’t assassinate them; we just vote them out.
The Church over the ages does not have a great record of living with dissent. The barbaric suppression of heresy at the time of the Reformation is an extreme example but the silencing of opposing theological views continues. The agenda of the recent Synod of Bishops was carefully controlled. The involvement of laity in decision-making is a ‘work in progress’.
But how about you and me? How do we live with those with whom we disagree? We’d love to see those who ‘rub us up the wrong way’ move on, disappear, get sick, retire.
There is a wonderful scene in the first act of Shakespeare’s Richard II. A courtier reports: ‘Old John of Gaunt is grievous sick, my Lord, suddenly taken’. The King replies: ‘Now put it, God, in the physician’s mind to help him to his grave immediately… Let’s all go visit him. Pray God we may make haste, and come too late.’
Sunday thoughts
Democracy,
for all its faults, allows those with conflicting ideologies
to live alongside each other in peace
“
