Official Anti-Catholic Bigotry Returns to British Parliament

From LifeSiteNews.com:

LONDON, January 29, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – British Catholics heard a flurry of naked anti-Catholic sentiments expressed last week by some government Members and Cabinet Ministers in the “row” over the government’s decision to force Churches to adopt children to homosexuals.

Anti-Catholic, anti-clerical and anti-papal slurs had been, until as recently as fifty years ago, standard fare in Britain’s political discourse where the established state Protestant religion is officially anti-Catholic, but most British people, both Catholics and Anglicans, were grateful to assign them to history’s waste bin.

“I’m not going to have some bloody reactionary German Pope dictate the law of our land,” said one minister quoted by Mary Ann Sieghart.

Sieghart writes in an Op-Ed in the Times, that another admitted, “only half-jokingly,” that his mother had always told him, “Never trust a Catholic.” A third asked, “Where’s all the child abuse and paedophilia? In the Catholic Church. They should get their own bloody house in order and sort out the way paedophilia lies hidden.”

The anti-Catholic sentiment of Labour’s hard-left elite, however, is not shared by everyone on the government side of the House. Of the 40 Catholic MP’s of Blair’s Labour party, a majority wanted the exemption.

The Telegraph quotes Peter Kilfoyle, MP for Liverpool Walton, a working class region, “This is just one more reason not to vote for us...”

[More]

(emphasis added)

My Comments:
Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, U.S. Congressman from Buffalo, NY, Brian Higgins - a Catholic, had this to say about Holy Mother Church, her teachings, and her clergy:

"The lesson here is that the Catholic Church has enough problems and should take greater care before allowing nonpriests to use the church as a forum to advance what clearly was a political agenda."

UPDATE (30 January)
The Catholic Knight has this to say:

I've got some cold, hard and naked truth for my fellow Catholics out there. This kind of bigotry exists in the United States government too, as well as the American media. Except these days, the elitists running things know well enough to keep it under wraps. Occasionally it slips out though. Anti-Catholicism is on the decline among Protestant Fundamentalists, but among Secular Liberals (protestant or otherwise) its exploding! Shocking as it may sound, for every Anti-Catholic Fundamentalist who gives up his prejudice, there are two Secular Liberals ready to replace him.

Catholic Americans would do well to resolve themselves to the following realities...

1. The US and UK are Protestant nations, and they will always be anti-Catholic in nature regardless of secularizing trends. If anything, secularization will make them more anti-Catholic and not less.

2. Anti-Catholic bigots will always be able to obtain positions of high authority and influence in the US and UK specifically because of their anti-Catholicism, just as anti-Semites will always be able to obtain positions of high authority and influence in Arab nations specifically because of their anti-Semitism.

3. No amount of compromise and pandering will ever satisfy the anti-Catholic elites running the US and UK. To them, the only good Catholic is a bad Catholic -- i.e. "one who doesn't follow the faith."

4. No matter how many Catholics there are in the US and UK, there will always be anti-Catholic bigots (veiled or open) running things. They cannot be beaten. They can only be frustrated.

5. The best way to frustrate a bigot is to continue to be exactly what he hates. Catholics need to start listening to the pope, attending mass regularly, and reading the Scriptures as well as the Catechism. Nothing will drive them more crazy than that. When you drive them crazy, their hidden prejudice will start to show, and then we can at least identify them.

Can't say that I disagree with him in the least.