BBC Nearly Manages A Catholic Message - But Along Comes Clifford Longley

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One of the reasons there was such a lot of news about the Pope's acceptance of the second miracle meaning that Mother Teresa can be canonised next year is that so many people, including BBC presenters and executives, remember who she was: a tiny little Albanian nun who did really good work in India.  They might not remember anything religious about her, but she was somebody good.  The fact that she was attacked by a Hitchens, probably translated as a plus: he was attacking her because of her religion, but that shone a highlight on how good her religion had made her.

Now this is a load of tosh, but a tosh that opened a tiny gap for a sensible discussion on what being a Saint mans, and what a miracle is.  So yesterday evening The World Tonight had a piece (available here) about 30 minutes in, in which a Humanist lady debated what it meant to be a Saint with a Catholic author and broadcaster: except it was Clifford Longley.

He believes that miracles are out of date, a part of the Church that it has to leave behind, as belief in them makes the Church look mediaeval and superstitious: the Church is moving in another direction and miracles are not crucial.  The fact that Mother Teresa was so far beyond the average do-gooder is what makes her a saint.

Do listen while you still can: surely the Catholic Communications Network, the media arm of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, will already have been on to the BBC demanding that they take down such an outrageous false statement of Catholic belief, and will be warning all print and broadcast media that Clifford Longley is not authorised to speak for the Catholic Church.

They won't of course, and it hasn't hard to imagine that Longley's beliefs are shared by more than one of the denizens of Eccleston Square: a real shame when, for once, the Church had the opportunity to talk to a receptive audience about the supernatural in our religion, but allowed somebody who appears not to believe in the supernatural to represent her views.

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