...below me as I write this, is the Clink Prison. Here, prisoners were held in grim conditions, and among them were Catholics imprisoned for their faith. There was hunger, illness, filth, lack of water, bitter cold in winter and stuffy airless heat in summer, and the threat of torture. There was fear and the horror that imprisonment might last for years and years...or that a grisly execution might be round the corner...
They didn't all agree with one another. There were tensions and even fights in those ghastly years of persecution: between Jesuits and other missionary priests, between men ordained in Mary's reign and men ordained abroad in Elizabeth's, between those who believed some political campaign or uprising might be the answer, and those who believed in just keeping going with Mass and the sacraments...
Protestants too were incarcerated in The Clink, all part of the misery created by religious coercion by the authorities of the day...
...and four centuries later, I can sit with a cup of coffee and slice of shortbread in comfort...and email a friend about a kneeler for his school chapel dedicated to St John Fisher, martyr of Henry's reign, whose death in 1535 would be the first of so many deaths of priests...
In the other direction I can see the grey Thames rolling by and the vast skyscrapers of London with their ugly shapes and lines of box-square windows lit up in the winter evening.
I hope we have learned the lessons from history about the need to allow human dignity and legitimate freedom in religious matters...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment