One of the leading figures in the Church of England has criticised the treatment of the Bishop of Raphoe, Bishop Philip Boyce and the attempts to have him prosecuted for inciting hatred.
The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) is considering prosecuting Bishop Boyce for inciting hatred against secularists, on foot of a complaint made to Gardaí.
The complaint was made by John Colgan from County Kildare after he took exception to a line in one of the Bishop's homilies delivered last August in Knock in County Mayo, which stated that the Irish church is, “attacked from outside by the arrows of a secular and godless culture.”
Mr Colgan who is a former leader of the campaign to separate Church and State said that such a statement, “was very angry language and adversely affects the respect with which secularists are held by Catholics.”
However, writing in his column in the Daily Mail in the UK the former Bishop of Canterbury George Carey said that such an attack on Bishop Boyce was an attack on the rights of Christians.
“In Ireland, a country where religion has played an even more central role than our own, things have gone further. And what did he (Bishop Boyce) say that caused such offence? That the Catholic church in Ireland is being attacked by the arrows of a secular and godless culture and that the distinguishing mark of Christian believers is the fact they have a future ; it is not that they know all the details that await them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness. For this, Bishop Boyce was accused of inciting hatred.”
He added, “Now that’s one case, brought in a foreign country, possibly by someone seeking publicity, but on that basis, I should be expecting a visit from the police for writing this article and indeed, for many sermons I've preached over the years which, while always intending to be loving and inclusive to all, may well have contained similar sentiments. Should we be preparing ourselves for the sight of uniformed officers marching down the aisle of a church and dragging off a priest simply because of what he's just said in the pulpit? It sounds preposterous. We've become enslaved to multiculturalism, political correctness and so-called equal rights, so obsessed with the idea of minimising any possible offence to any minority group that we don't seem to have realised that one of the great British human qualities, tolerance, has now been replaced by intolerance.”