Motes and Beams

The new RC Archbishop of Weegiedom, Dr Tagliatelle, has managed to get himself in much hot water prior to his enthronement.  First, the Grub Street hacks of the West dug out a video of him at a Conference in the august setting  of CS Lewis's old Oxford college where he suggests (albeit with enough hedges to make you think he was a Sussex farmer) that a fairly recently departed Labour MP who was a former RC priest and openly gay had somehow had his lifespan shortened by his lifestyle. http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/archbishop-condemned-for-remarks-about-gay-mp.18248404  The fact that the gallstones and pancreatitis that actually carried off the said MP are not normally cited as a "gay plague" may lead one to suspect the said prelate is talking through an orifice not normally linked to the vocal chords.  Then they ran a stinker on a former colleague of his - indeed his former deputy and successor at the Pontifical Scots College in Rome, who had been disciplined for getting drunk and making a pass at another bloke. http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/how-the-catholic-church-whitewashed-priests-homosexual-advances.18276120

This litany of foot-in-mouth may suggest that the it's the liberal "meeja" out to get the Church.  Or it may suggest that the media is targeting public institutional hypocrisy in the RC Church in Scotland.  either way, it's a startlingly inept performance from someone who has be the Scottish RC "Media Bishop" for the past 6 years.  I have much sympathy for the rebuked cleric whose lapse of judgement fuelled by alcohol has been put in to the public domain well after he doubtless hoped it was water under the bridge.  If he took the pastoral counselling offered and worked on his issues with drink and sexuality successfully, then my sympathies are all the stronger.  Occasionally one does think that the Bishops of all the Churches might reflect rather more on Matthew 7:3 before opening their traps.

Thoughts on the world tonight.

This article from the Independent makes depressing reading:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/the-love-that-still-dare-not-speak-its-name-1863913.html

There is much to love in Africa and much to weep over. But I find it increasingly impossible to see the self-proclaimed moral authority of the African provinces of the Anglican Communion as being something I would be willing to submit the Church in Scotland to. Perhaps innocently, I had always assumed the various provinces to be of equal standing and authority. The headlong rush by the powers that be in England to keep the likes of Uganda and Nigeria "sweet" leaves me baffled. The failure of the those Provinces to challenge either Government corruption or legal provisions against its citizens of a draconian and barbaric nature, to me at any rate, deprives them of any right to be taken seriously as moral examples or tutors by the Church in the Old World.

Less depressingly I've just finished reading a fine novel set in Glasgow called "Buddha Da". Very amusing and also touching, it is a treat for any fan of the richly expressive Weegie dialect, a nice insight into Buddhist spirituality - and contains 2 sentences which summarise my lifelong feelings about carrots! Well worth a read.