The Bishop of Arundel and Brighton has defended a priest in his
diocese following criticism from the local and national press,
concerning a blog post the priest wrote about the poor.
Bishop Kieran Conry said that Fr Ray Blake “does an awful lot of good
work” in supporting the poor in Arundel and Brighton, adding “it was a
bit of mischief” on the part of the local newspaper that published the
original story.
Fr Blake has come under attack from the local and national press for a
blog post which he published last week which began: “The trouble with
the poor is that they are messy.” It was picked up by the local
newspaper, The Argus.
While Bishop Conry said that the post was “slightly misguided” and
“could have been phrased better”, he added: “They’ve taken a few lines
in it where what Fr Ray Blake was trying to say is that the poor are
very challenging… In its proper context it makes sense”.
In his original blog post on Saturday, Fr Blake wrote: “The trouble
with the poor is that they are messy. There is a secluded area between
the church and our hall, a passage occasionally we find someone has got a
few cardboard boxes together and has slept there and if it has been
raining leaves a sodden blanket, cardboard there to be cleaned up, often
it also smells of urine and there is often excrement there and
sometimes a used needle or two.”
He later continued: “Even in our pain and suffering we can grow
complacent, ‘the poor’ challenge our complacency. They interrupt our
comfort, our prayer, our routine bringing the mess of their lives into
our lives… The sin of the Pharisees, of the rich man in the story of
Dives and Lazarus, is complacency. The rich man didn’t even notice the
mess that Lazarus created at his front door, he didn’t respond to it, he
needed someone to bring him out of his complacency.”
The Argus subsequently featured the blog post in a report beginning:
“A complaining priest claims ‘lying’ poor people have been sent by God
to ‘test my holiness’”.
Following the report, Fr Ray Blake wrote another post stating: “I was
saying that the poor, the really poor, turn our lives upside down. I
know the local paper pays peanuts and expects its journalists to create
stories in order to get on to the news networks but this is just a …
misrepresentation.”
In a post on Sunday, he wrote: “After recent happenings I have been thinking I ought to stop blogging.”