Plenary, 10 Sep 2003

Meeting date: Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Official Report 365KB pdf

---

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business today is time for reflection. We welcome Father Chris Boles from the Edinburgh Jesuit Community.

Good afternoon. Anniversaries mean a great deal to us. We go out of our way to mark them and they serve to keep us attentive to the person or event connected to the anniversary. When we think of anniversaries, we usually think of happy events—wedding anniversaries, birthdays and so on. In my religious tradition, the Catholic Church, it is more commonly anniversaries of the dead that are remembered—perhaps anniversaries of family members who have died, or feast days of saints. Our society in general also marks anniversaries, and the many columns that appear in newspapers telling us what happened "on this day in history" keep us aware of anniversaries of things long past.

Tomorrow sees an anniversary that many people the world over will remember and mark in one way or another. The date 11 September will be forever tied to the terrible events in New York and Washington two years ago. The date has great significance, but we also mark another tragic anniversary tomorrow—one that predates the twin towers by 28 years and which that event ought never to overshadow.

For millions of people in Chile and throughout Latin America, 11 September was already a dark day in their memory. Following General Pinochet's coup d'état on that date in 1973, 11 September is referred to as "the day democracy died". We would do well here in this young Parliament to keep that in mind. We may also remember that the referendum on whether to establish the Scottish Parliament took place on 11 September 1997. In Chile, democracy died that day in 1973. In the days and years to follow, thousands of Chilean people also died. Those anniversaries are each as precious as those of the victims in the twin towers, which we will remember tomorrow.

There are countless other anniversaries tomorrow as well, involving people and places the world over. On 11 September or, for that matter, on any other date that you care to name last year, more than 5,000 Africans died from AIDS and more than 2,000 children died from measles. Deaths such as those are not simply anniversaries; they are current events as well and tragic ones, at that. Certainly, we remember those who died in the World Trade Center and of course we pray for them and their families, but let us not forget all those others—from Chile, from Africa and from Scotland, too—whose anniversaries are also tomorrow but who will have little or no memorial.

In the Catholic Church, a very common prayer for the dead is one in which we ask for their eternal rest and for perpetual light to shine upon them. It strikes me that it is not just the dead who need a perpetual light; we could ourselves make good use of it. Politicians in particular, since your decisions here in the chamber affect the lives of so many people for good or for ill, may be in need of perpetual light more than most. So here are two prayerful thoughts today: I pray for all those everywhere whose anniversary is tomorrow, and I pray for perpetual light to illumine all of you and to guide the decisions that you make here in Parliament. Thank you.