Anglican bishop backs remain camp, praising EU’s peacekeeping role

Mar 26, 2016 by

by Jamie Doward, Guardian:

Leading cleric’s defence of union is criticised by campaigners for Britain to leave and by secular groups.

A Church of England bishop has become the first high-profile cleric to wade into the EU debate in an intervention that will give succour to the remain camp.

The Right Rev Alan Smith, bishop of St Albans, has made an implicitly supportive argument for the EU and its enduring role in preventing conflict.

Smith observed that the EU was born out of a search for peace after the two world wars and that if Britain voted to leave it must consider how the EU’s legacy of uniting nations together could be safeguarded, to prevent the continent falling into violence and genocide.

While acknowledging that it was not the church’s job to tell people how to vote, the bishop – who sits in the House of Lords – called for churches to be venues for hustings where the issues about leaving or remaining in the EU could be debated.

In two addresses to his diocese made in the run-up to Easter, Smith explained that the union’s original founding goals were to improve solidarity and economic prosperity.

He argued that the “European project” contained a moral and religious vision embedded in Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage “embodied explicitly in most of the Christian Democrat parties on the continent, who drew on Roman Catholic social teaching”.

Read here

 

Related Posts

Tags

Share This