Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is the Right Rev Stephen Robson, the Bishop of Dunkeld.
Thank you very much, Presiding Officer and members. I bring you the good will of the Catholic people of the diocese of Dunkeld. Thank you very much for inviting me.
My father was 90 yesterday. He has been badly traumatised by many of the developments in the world around him. Like so many of the elderly, he is ill at ease with modernity; he has had enough of drastic change in his life. So, sadly, on his 90th birthday last night after dinner, he said to me, “Son, I’m glad I’m on the way out.”
It was not the threat of a war or terrorist violence that caused him to feel like that but, rather, the endless cultural changes in contemporary society. It brought it home to me that my father and countless others like him are in culture shock. Sociologists tell us that
“Culture shock is the personal disorientation a person feels when experiencing a trauma caused by a clash between unfamiliar world-views.”
In the last decade, cultural change has arguably been Scottish society’s greatest challenge—or one of them, at least. It is not so much social changes that are the problem as the increased pace of those changes, which have left many people, and not only the elderly, straggling behind. The result for some has been cultural disorientation.
Furthermore, in a highly globalised world when all the world’s social challenges and cultural problems appear as if they are sprouting in our own back yard, we cannot just tackle them all at once; we need time to absorb change if culture shock is to be avoided.
Each one of us constructs our reality from the building blocks that our parents, families, communities and society provide us with. Of course, there are times when our understanding of reality must be challenged, but please may you as legislators be compassionate about the effects of change—not everyone can absorb it at the same rate. There will always be the wayfarers, the stragglers, the reluctant and the downright stubborn. Win minds and hearts first, rather than coerce by force of law.
May legislators be mindful that for believers, man-made positive law, such as that made in this chamber, can and does bind bodies but not necessarily souls. For if, perchance, positive law is found to be in serious opposition to God’s law, for example, or to the natural law written on human hearts, God’s law, for the believer, will always trump man’s. That is the first lesson, I suppose, in religious freedom. As Thomas More once said, quoting the gospels,
“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but to lose his soul?”
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Point of Order