The faith that moves mountains. But not apparently nations

The head of the Catholic Church visits a country which has a majority of Buddhists, representatives of a religion that is a byword for peacefulness and tolerance, but who are busily exterminating members of another of the world’s great faiths, Islam. The Pope carefully avoids naming the victims as Rohingya, because that might further inflame those gentle Buddhists and turn their attentions to Christians as well.

The Pope in Myanmar: don’t mention the Rohingya

Those Rohingya are members of a religion that believes that to save a single life is tantamount to saving the entire human race. And yet members of that religion, Islam – admittedly a tiny minority of it – seem to have convinced themselves that it is holy work to kill large numbers of people in its name.

The behaviour of that minority has inflamed many in the West into passionate Islamophobia. Some of those justify their hatred on the grounds that they are Christians, or belong at any rate to countries that are Christian in their roots. This is a curious notion, in many cases.

In Britain, for example, only around one in twenty people regularly attends a church service of any Christian denomination. But then, maybe they’re thinking of the underlying values rather than actual Church practice. Principles such as

Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him

or

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God

or

Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these

The first of those is a little hard to reconcile with Britain’s long love-affair with weapons, a little reduced these days but only because austerity is enforcing cuts even on the military.

The second is just as hard to reconcile with the other side of the austerity coin, which has been to enrich the wealthiest members of society still further, making it, I assume, harder than ever for them to get into the kingdom of heaven.

As for the third, that commitment to children is proclaimed by most Brits, but rather subverted by the discovery that the country has one of the worst rates of stillbirth in Western Europe. Why? Here are the words of Gill Walton, Chief Executive of the Royal College of Midwives:

We’ve got a real concern about staffing levels… we really need more staff and more capacity in order to safely care for mums and babies.

Austerity hammers children too, it seems. As we find in the recent reports that two-thirds of English children referred for mental healthcare remain untreated. And it’s not just children: refuges for women escaping domestic violence are being forced to close through lack of funding, hospital Emergency Departments are being increasingly staffed by unqualified doctors, and the hospitals themselves are, in greater numbers than ever before, facing bankruptcy without more finance.

It seems that our Christian values aren’t strong enough to insist on the support the vulnerable. Instead we prefer to elect and re-elect a government committed to serving the wealthiest by imposing these cuts on services that would otherwise protect the poor. Perhaps our supposed Christianity has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ, and merely provides a justification for our dislike of the other, the foreigner, the person from outside our community.

Faith without compassion. Whether in Myanmar, in ISIS or, sadly, in Britain.