Vocations & Questions for Parliamentary Candidates from Bishop of Portsmouth

Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth Diocese has issued a Pastoral Letter (14th May 2017) entitled God is Calling You. In it, he discusses vocation and challenges us all to pray for vocations, and offers some important questions which we can put to those who are seeking election to Parliament in June.



I found an interesting correlation with this and Dr Joe Shaw's most recent post on Fatima which talks about the potential of Catholic Social teaching, properly lived out, to fundamentally change the world for the better:

As a former active and senior member of the Communist Party, both in the Spanish Civil War and in industrial Glasgow, Fraser was particularly interested in the connection with the conversion of Russia. He goes on to argue that, quite aside from any spectacular supernatural intervention, Russia's conversion would be inevitable if the Church's social teaching was manifested in the daily lives (including the work lives) of Catholics around the world.

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In light of this recognition, the Catholic business man would not confine himself to making generous donations to the Church; in the market place no less than in the sacristy he would make it abundantly clear that to all and sundry that business need not always mean mere business. As an employer of labour, he would, like the Harmels and Alan Turner, provide a living example of the meaning of the great social encyclicals.

The Catholic worker would be similarly distinguished from the herd of the class-conscious. An ardent defender of justice for his fellow-workers and a conscientious member of his trade union, he would seek to give to the latter that Christian idealism which in the nineteenth century so distinguished the British trade unions from their anti-religious counterparts on the Continent. Insisting on the dignity of labour, he would insist no less on the humanity of the employer, and would refuse to be stampeded by the prevalent assumption that the doctrine of original sin is applicable only to owners of capital. ...

If, therefore, only the Catholic business men and the Catholic workers in our hypothetical parish were thus won over to realise that meaning of Christ's Kingship as it affected their daily lives, the mission of the Church would become visible for the first time in the modern world to the non-Catholic section of the population no less than to the Faithful themselves.