Burnham and the Legacy of Henry 8th- The State against the Catholic Conscience.

[00:00:16]History goes in cycles, doesn't it?

[00:00:18]The day of Starmer's resignation is the feast of St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher.

[00:00:24]More and Fisher were two very brave Catholics who gave their lives confronting the state.

[00:00:29]The difficulty is the state has got ambitious again. It's not now about the dynasty of a Welsh tribe called the Tudors. It's about, as it always has been, about the primacy of conscience and what human beings are all about.

[00:00:45]I remember watching Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons, when I was about 11. I was entranced with him. I admired him enormously. I could see that dying for his conscience and his integrity was one of the most important things a man could ever be brought to. If you had to live and die for your conscience against the state, you were doing a noble thing, something that gave integrity to your life that flowed backwards and forwards.

[00:01:10]Everything that More had done or had not done was vindicated by his willingness to sacrifice himself.

[00:01:17]More was a very clever man, but actually, like Burnham, he was a man of the people, too. Uh his grandfather was a baker in London.

[00:01:25]As it happens, his father was a lawyer, and he became a very serious intellectual. He wrote this book, Utopia, called Nowhere, to take the piss out of the idea that human beings could make a perfect society.

[00:01:37]We have to continue More's tradition of mocking and satirizing the idiotic idea that the state can make people better, can improve people.

[00:01:47]The idea that's been around particularly for the last 200 years, although More experienced an early version of it, is that that those who run the state and wield political power by attacking the symptoms of human decay can put people right with education, persuasion, resources.

[00:02:05]In the end, when people don't cooperate and when they don't get put right, they then get punished instead. And first of all, they get fined and then they get put into prison and finally, they get executed. That was the story of Marxism in the 20th century.

[00:02:19]It is quite extraordinary. It's the feast of Thomas More that should happen on Catholics ought to stand up and make a great deal of noise about what's at stake here.

[00:02:28]I found myself talking on American television today about the fact that Burnham is a little bit Catholic.

[00:02:34]He makes them a lot of the fact he was an altar boy once and brought up as a Catholic. He claims that Catholic social teaching informs him. What is Catholic social teaching? It's ideas about human dignity and the common good, concern for the poor. All well and good.

[00:02:49]But his views are socialist views indistinguishable from other people on the left in the socialist party. Many of them are atheists. There's nothing Catholic about their views apart from the fact that the idea that human beings should live better is a Christian idea, but it's about the kingdom of heaven.

[00:03:07]It's not about utopia, meaning nowhere.

[00:03:10]There is nowhere where the state can perfect people as they do.

[00:03:16]More died as a matter of protecting his conscience. He would not make a vow of allegiance to the king and allow the king to see himself as the alternative to the Pope. Henry VIII was an anti-pope.

[00:03:31]Thomas More's belief in the Pope was really important. It's not a matter of tribal of of of Catholic tribalism. The Pope represents the guarantor as as a guarantor of the human conscience.

[00:03:45]The human conscience is a gift from God.

[00:03:47]Catholics believe we're made in the image of God and God has given us a conscience as a kind of telephone line, so we can keep in touch with him, so that he can direct us to change our behavior when it's going wrong, as he gradually reels us in to heaven, saved and healed by the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross, and changed by love and by vision. This is very different from being changed by compulsion, by the state.

[00:04:14]When Thomas More believed in the Pope, he believed in the integrity of God's plan and the human conscience as a way of responding to it.

[00:04:22]The state won't allow us our consciences. Already the state [snorts] is locking up people who speak out on behalf of their conscience, or who act on behalf of their conscience.

[00:04:33]So, people are very excited by the fact Andy Burnham had a Catholic upbringing, but the fact is that he doesn't believe in any of the Catholic ethics. And why do the Catholic ethics matter?

[00:04:43]Why has it all come down to sex again?

[00:04:45]Not just because we're preoccupied by sex or addicted to it, but because the way we treat sexual ethics determines whether or not human beings are pleasure machines machines seeking distraction and enjoyment, or whether we're answerable to God as co-agents of creation. The way we use sex puts us in one camp or the other.

[00:05:07]The fact that Burnham is in favor of the progressive view on sex, that it should be used essentially as people want it to be, and not in any way as God commands or directs or requires, shows us that so far from being Catholic, he's anti-Catholic. So far from being formed by God originally, he's anti-God. He wants the state to determine how people behave. He believes in the collective, not the individual.

[00:05:35]And so, the difficulty we have now is that Burnham is coming in wearing Catholic credentials, but fulfilling an anti-Catholic, an anti-God agenda.

[00:05:43]Catholics have to stand up and say time and time again to the state that this left progressive project of trying to fix the symptoms and not the cause of human distress never works. There is nowhere in the world where the socialist project has worked, where people have been improved.

[00:06:04]Every time the socialist set out to improve the human condition, they take people hostage, they lock up they lock them up for exercising their conscience and ultimately ultimately after locking up, they kill them. This is the road we're on yet again. It's not even as if there is an economic solution which the progressive left have discovered.

[00:06:26]What they've done is to bankrupt the economy every single time they've had power and they're doing it again.

[00:06:32]They do not give us they don't give us political or rather economic flourishing.

[00:06:37]They damage the conscience and they threaten us with the power of the state against everything we believe in and the way we want to live. Catholics need politicians who will diminish the state and allow people to exercise their conscience in a way that doesn't limit the choices other people are entitled to make for themselves.

[00:07:03]One of the things Catholics have to do is to stand up and say we are not pleasure machines. We are not determined by our sexual or our political identity.

[00:07:13]We are in fact given life as a gift from God to whom we will become accountable and it's this very accountability that means we have to obey our consciences whatever the price and if the state sets itself on a collision course against our conscience, then it may very well crush us. May very well find us and imprison us and ultimately kill us, but we cannot give way or we become nothing. We become pleasure machines. We become little jigsaw pieces as part of the collective.

[00:07:46]We lose our humanity. We lose everything that makes gives us value.

[00:07:52]Burnham's election is the beginning of another cycle of political disaster in a culture that is determined to bring some kind of utopia, nowhere remember, solution to the human condition.

[00:08:08]Catholics have to make our voices heard to remind human beings that the gift of our humanity, the gift of a conscience, has to do with God and we can introduce them to God. We know God because we encounter him in the historical person of Jesus.

[00:08:24]Jesus becomes utterly compelling for those who meet him.

[00:08:30]And at a time of crisis like this, it's not enough just to exercise a vote and vote for one party or another as if it's a preference. We have to vote against those people who are going to expand the state and crush the human conscience.

[00:08:46]That's the project that Andy Burnham has committed himself to. That's the project that the Labour Party are determined to fulfill and are exercising at the moment.

[00:08:57]It's not that I can create a political party that is going to be guaranteed to roll back the power of the state. The problem is the moment people get power, they are um they they idealize power and they become addicted to it enormously. There is no political solution, but there are less worse political solutions.

[00:09:16]And the less worse one would be to reject this economically incompetent progressive government and to refuse to give a mandate to people who are willing to strangle our consciences and subjugate our humanity to their political projects which can be fulfilled precisely nowhere. They are utopian in that sense.

[00:09:43]The residual part of this country that is Christian and particularly Catholic needs to stand up and to make its nose known. We are not just a minority with different views. We represent the society that has flourished for the last a thousand years, flourished on Catholic principles, flourished on the presence with the presence of the church, which did all the things that the state took over in terms of feeding the poor, preserving human dignity, giving education, providing places for people to die, providing hospitals for people to be made better. The church did that without compelling people in the way the state has done. We need to remember our history and above all we need to stand up against this diabolical project which is going to destroy consciences and imprison prisoners of conscience.

[00:10:33]Andy Burnham, a cheerful, intelligent chappie is from Manchester, is not fulfilling any Catholic obligations. He is, in fact, anti-Catholic and anti-God because the values he holds are those of the state, which will brook no dissent and which will crush us if it gets the opportunity.

[00:10:54]We have to resist. Initially, we must resist ideologically, intellectually, and spiritually. How far that resistance goes is something we can't tell, but it must have no limits if we are to preserve the primacy of conscience.