A Question of Priorities

"Let us ask ourselves what it means for us to be ministers of God in a land scarred by war, hatred, violence and poverty," suggested the leader of an organisation which numbers among its more notable historic achievements the Crusades, the Inquisition, numerous pogroms and witch-burnings, the accumulation of vast worldly wealth, and the formation and protection of one of the world's most extensive and commercially successful societies for the promulgation of sexual abuse. In the context of South Sudan, where His Holiness was speaking, it means justifying the consequences of civil war, flooding and extreme poverty, to which the Deity has thus far responded after His usual manner, by sitting back complacently upon His Heavenly throne and watching His children suffer. The Pope is on a pilgrimage of peace alongside his counterparts from the Churches of England and Scotland: the first expedition of its kind in Christian history, although adherents of all three factions spent the colonial era and the period of the Atlantic slave trade bestowing upon the African continent spiritual gifts which were no doubt extensive. Another meaning of the joint ministry, therefore, is that since the middle of the sixteenth century Christian leaders have had more important things to do.