Scottish Catholic Observer

A VIEW persists among too many Catholics, I think, that the referendum on Scottish independence is purely a secular one and has very little to do with matters of faith. This is a misguided and lazy assumption and a possibly dangerous one too. For if all Catholics felt this way then we, as a Church, would have forfeited our right to be heard in Scotland’s thrumming ideological marketplace.

When I was a child I once listened in quiet dread to my old teacher Nan McCafferty telling us the message of Matthew 25:

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

“I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink.

“I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?

“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

I have thought of these lines often during my life and believe that they oblige us to participate actively in alleviating poverty, illness and oppression. This obligation, I believe, extends to the political choices we make and the sort of society that may come about by those choices.

I f we lived in a society where the poorest and most vulnerable are left to fend for themselves might we not get asked what our voting pattern was during all of this. Did we, in political terms, simply walk by on the other side by always taking the safe and selfish option rather than that which may have helped lift our brothers and sisters out of poverty, slavery and discrimination?

It’s not as if there aren’t any moral or ethical issues that travel to the heart of the Christian message. We are currently living in a society that is among the world’s most affluent yet where the gap between the rich and the poor is the fourth biggest in the world.

Figures released today show that top executive pay is more than 140 times better than shop-floor salaries. Few companies think it’s morally correct to pay a ‘living wage’ to their employees and instead hide behind the insubstantial fig-leaf of the minimum wage. The living wage is £7.65 and is calculated to be the lowest rate at which a person can have access to the basics that would provide him with the barest degree of quality in his life.

As the UK’s wealth has grown, and even as David Cameron and George Osborne tell us that their austerity drive is paying dividends for British businesses, so we have seen food-banks mushrooming in some of our most socially challenged neighbourhoods. There are those on the right who say that food-banks are unnecessarily dramatic and hint at a problem that doesn’t really exist. There are others who aver that their very existence is a good think as they give the rest of us a chance to be kind and compassionate.

Let me tell you about food-banks. There are many good and decent people, who have had jobs or who have been left helpless with children by changing domestic circumstances, who visit them because, literally, they must feed their children. It’s always about the children.

There are also those who are in work but whose wages are obscenely poor that they require a top-up in basic groceries to put enough food on the table.

In England and Wales the NHS budget is being cut to the tune of around £25 billion a year. Large parts of it are being sold off to privateers who will simply open a market in the most lucrative operations and procedures. And though health is devolved to Holyrood, such a rate of spending cuts will soon impact on the Scottish NHS.

Last month the Ministry of Defence announced that it is committed to spending £13bn over the next 10 years on maintaining our nuclear deterrent on the River Clyde. That means that Scottish tax-payers will pay £1bn during the same period to maintain a weapon of cold, mass, conscienceless destruction in its own waters.

So please, I entreat you, do not travel under the misapprehension that there are no issues in the independence debate to engage us as Catholics and Christians.

And please also pay no attention to George Galloway MP and others who ought to know better, such as my Catholic Observer colleague Hugh Dougherty, who would have us believe somehow that Catholics will become more vulnerable in an independent Scotland because the forces of anti-Catholicism are much more subdued and diluted in the bigger UK. Professor Tom Devine is much more eloquent than me in dismissing this dangerous nonsense. This is what he said to me about the issue last week as part of an interview for The Observer.

“This is nonsense; George is, as usual, talking rhetoric. None of those assertions is based on any academic understanding or knowledge. The most recent data from the Scottish social attitudes survey in 2012 demonstrated that, of the three main groupings—Catholics, Protestants and non-believers—the Catholics sampled indicated that 36 per cent were committed to Scottish independence; non-believers were about 27 per cent and the Kirk 16 per cent. This tells me that people of Irish ethnicity, for the first time, feel comfortable in their Scottish skins.”

I love you George, and your fight against injustice and inequality, but on this issue, wee man, you are talking mince.

We have a moral duty to vote on Scotland’s future on September 18. There we will be faced with a choice which we may be asked to justify at the end of our lives.