Who had the right to deny a dying man the comfort of a priest?
DO WE in Britain respect the beliefs of others any more? I was shocked by how furious I was when I learned that a Roman Catholic priest had been told by police that he could not enter the building where Sir David Amess had been stabbed to give him the last rites.
I am myself a very protestant Protestant and do not expect or wish for a priest to be present at the hour of my death. In my childhood, in my bit of Britain, Roman Catholics were still regarded as outsiders, rather as Muslims seem to be now, only more so. But in those times, I am absolutely sure that the police would not have acted in this way.
We were nervous of Catholics precisely because we took Christian belief seriously, and so did they. Now, of all the religions of the world, Christianity is the one which is least respected by the British state and by our national culture.
People who say they are Buddhists, for instance, tend to be
I HAVE been getting up in the dark for weeks now and, like everyone who rises early, I long for the return of light mornings next Sunday, the 31st, when the clocks at last stop being forced to lie, and go back to their natural position. Late-rising childless bohemians who never see the dawn, except when they are on the way home from an especially good party, think this is the day when it gets darker. They have it the wrong way round. viewed as admirable and adventurous. Christians are seen as a bit batty and weird, and are welladvised to keep quiet about their faith in quite a lot of workplaces.
I won’t try to explain here just why the last rites matter so much to Catholics. But it is absolutely obvious that they do matter hugely to them. One of the most moving contributions to the Commons debate celebrating the life of Sir David came from a Labour MP, Mike Kane. He said, in words of great simplicity and power: ‘Catholics believe that extreme unction helps guide the soul to God after death.’
He suggested an ‘Amess amendment’ so that no matter where it is needed and wanted, the sacrament should not be denied. I think this is a good idea. But when I criticised the exclusion of the priest last week on social media, I encountered an astonishing blast of hostility.
First of all there was a serious attempt to pretend that the incident had not happened, a falsehood which I countered with the priest’s own tweet saying he had been ‘refused entry’ and ‘not allowed to minister to Sir David at the end’. Then the Essex police said it was all to do with the ‘utmost importance’ of preserving the integrity of a crime scene.
Now, if this was a common problem and could happen easily, I might think it was a better argument. But I have searched in vain for any example of a prosecution which failed because a priest had contaminated a crime scene, by giving the last rites. I’m not saying it has never happened, just that it is not a common event.
I asked a former investigator, who said this was a risk, to tell me what exactly that risk was. He couldn’t give me an example. I did find one instance of the alleged contamination of a crime scene by paramedics, at Shoreham-by-Sea in West Sussex in 2019. But the trial went ahead and the attacker was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison. I think the crime scene claim is just an excuse to say no.
IUNDERSTAND that many people in our society, including in the police, do not believe in God, or in any religion. But Sir David Amess did. For him (and, I suspect, for his family) the comfort of a priest at the moment of death was as important as any emergency service. Not very long ago this would have been accepted without question. Now it is not. Many of those who reject it do so with great bitterness, spite and venom, while some are just indifferent.
But in both cases I wonder if we have much of a future as a civilisation if we live and think and act as if eternity does not exist. I believe very profoundly that what we do here matters somewhere else, often in ways we do not fully understand. And that whenever we forget that, we go seriously wrong.