Towards a new dissolution

Are you sitting comfortably? Once upon a time there was a wicked king who, being rather strapped for cash and with a few other (or lack of) personal issues, decided that a good fund raiser would be to go and seize the goods of one of the major charitable organisations of his realm and apply them to his own purposes. Directly and indirectly the monasteries and religious houses, and the hospitals and schools they ran, were sucked dry and left to ruin. The resources they had amassed, through their own work and the generosity of their Catholic ancestors and benefactors, would be applied to protestantism and its supporters. You may debate the rights and wrongs of the dissolution of the monasteries but there is little doubt that there was a breach of trust. Money and resources intended for the maintenance of the Catholic religion was redirected.

Today, in modern Britain, you can smell the same sulphurous breach of trust happening; sometimes blatantly, but more often in a subtle way where resources and cash are forced into non Catholic purposes. I have little doubt that those who had been so generous to the various Catholic adoption agencies in their own lifetimes are now pleading in Heaven that their well intentioned donations will not now fall into the hands wicked men. They may not seize the cash directly but we certainly seem to be seeing a secular Charity Commission dictating what it can and cannot be spent on.

Even more subtle is the potential subverting of Catholic trust and charitable money. Many of these organisations, schools and the like, are fearsome that unless they increase the services benefiting the general public they will lose charitable status. The implications of this probably mean a loss of cash for those who decide to give up tax exempt status. For those who capitulate it will mean the application of money intended for Catholic purposes, under the smoke screen of cultural and religious diversity, to the education of 'scholarship' students for whom the funds were not intended. One can imagine a similar problem with the various 'counselling services' supported directly or using Catholic charitable properties. To maintain good grace with our civil lords and masters they will have to be set free of the 'shackles' of Catholic belief.

Once upon a time? Really, at the moment I'm sitting rather uncomfortably.