My car recently failed its MOT test because of the rosary beads hanging from the rear-view mirror. The mechanic said it was now illegal. I hadn’t noticed, having merely followed my previous bishop’s suggestion to hang beads as a simple witness of faith in our secularised society. Surely the new restriction has nothing to do with bigotry; it is purely a matter of safety: “obstruction within driver’s field of view”. Let us not complain – during penal times, we would be hanged if found with beads.
In 2018, though, how truly safe is our Catholic identity? Have we noticed any new restrictions to our rights as believers in past decades? If we haven’t, others have. Christianity is in peril worldwide, and “almost vanquished” in Britain and Ireland, as Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor put it in 2001. This was before the legalisation of gay marriage. What would the cardinal say today, after the Irish referendum on abortion, the ban on prayerful witness outside abortuaries and the advance of transgender ideology even in Catholic schools?
