Scottish Cardinal condemns flawed approach to social ills

|PIC1|The head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland has condemned the Scottish Government for addressing the symptoms of social breakdown while ignoring the causes.

In a hard hitting Easter message, Cardinal Keith O’Brien said the Scottish Government’s approach to social ills such as drug use, anti-social behaviour and promiscuity was “deeply flawed” and “utterly discredited”.

Instead of educating young people on morality and objective truth, Scotland’s politicians continue to pass “frenzied regulation”, he said.

“In every instance we seek to mitigate the effects of bad behaviour and perhaps place barriers in the paths of such acts,” he said. “We do not as a society take action to tackle the underlying motivation; instead we limit our action to blunting the impact of our excesses. We obsess over the symptoms and ignore the cause.”

Cardinal O’Brien said he was alarmed by the high rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, among the highest in Europe.

He pointed to recent research showing that people who had experienced family breakdown were more likely to fail at school and drug and alcohol problems, while children of cohabiting parents are more likely to underperform at school and suffer from emotional problems than the children of married parents.

The Cardinal hit out at the Scottish Government for passing legislation making divorce easier and quicker while penalising married couples.

“These attacks on marriage and stable family relationships have caused unimaginable misery, pain and life-long failure for thousands of children. They have led to disastrous social and economic consequences for our nation,” he said.

“We have denied [young people] security, stability and morality we have contrived to hide from them objective truth.

“We have failed them and we are paying the price for that failure in shattered lives and broken, often suicidal children.”

He added: “As the human debris of our failure accumulates a stifling political consensus seems to compel our parties and our Parliament into further frenzied regulation.”

Cardinal O’Brien urged the Scottish Government to offer universal access to marriage preparation courses and remedial and reconciliation services to couples in difficulty. He also called for an urgent reform of the tax credit system giving more breaks to married couples.

“We cannot micro legislate or regulate our way out of this situation. We cannot possibly predict every conceivable aberration and prepare a parliamentary response to it,” he said.

“Instead we must educate a new generation in morality and objective truth. As the Chinese proverb has it: ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’

“Rather than giving our young people a law a day to keep excess at bay we might try to impart what Pope Benedict has described as ‘true values which give life a foundation’.”