Wasting taxpayers’ money in Birmingham
In times of austerity, every last penny of public money should be wisely spent. Take £25,000 of public money in the hands of Birmingham City Council, for example. What might be a good way to spend this? Textbooks for local schools, equipment for a local hospital, repairs to broken pavements?
No, let’s throw £25,000 at a project to erect a statue of a Catholic priest instead:
A funding shortfall to pay for a work of art to celebrate the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Birmingham has been met by the city council.
The sculpture of the Blessed John Henry Newman was commissioned by the authority, to mark the visit last year.
It was hoped public donations would pay for the statue of the Victorian clergyman who was beatified by the Pope in a special Mass.
However, because not enough was raised the council has plugged the gap.
The statue of the Blessed John Henry Newman has been made by Tim Tolkien, the great-nephew of author JRR Tolkien.
The city council said it cost £30,000 of which £5,000 was raised by public donations.
According to the Pope, speaking in Birmingham last year:
The definite service to which Blessed John Henry was called involved applying his keen intellect and his prolific pen to many of the most pressing “subjects of the day”.
How about a pressing subject such as slavery?
According to Newman, slavery could not be condemned as ‘intrinsically evil’ because Paul didn’t think it was. After all, ‘had it been intrinsically evil, had it been in se a sin, it must have been said to Philemon, liberate all your slaves at once’. Slavery, Newman concluded, is ‘a condition of life ordained by God in the same sense that other conditions of life are’.
Hardly particularly impressive.
And here’s the reactionary Newman on Satan, from a lecture on ‘The Times of Antichrist’:
He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform. This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination, —he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind.
God forbid!
Why is public money being used to commemorate this man?
