No Cross or Crucifix To Be Worn At Work

According to The Telegraph, the UK government is apparently now set on arguing in the European Court of Human Rights, that Christians cannot claim the right to wear a cross or a crucifix at work.

This despite the fact that Article 9 of the European Court of Human Rights states that: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.”

I don’t know whether article 9 of the European Court of Human Rights specifically protects our rights to wear crosses and crucifixes or not. At face value article 9 does lead me to believe that it does defend this right. However, I have learned that today words do not always mean what they mean. Politicians, and others, find incredibly disingenuous ways to manipulate words into a thousand different meanings to suit their particular agenda.

What I however find difficult to accept is this! Christians are forced to tolerate so much that is distasteful, insulting and immoral. We have to tolerate people using terms like “Oh Jesus” or “Oh my God” or “Good Lord” as casually as can be, even as curses. We have to tolerate people displaying obscene tattoos, including satanic images and obscene images of our Lady, soft porn on television and people like Madonna making an absolute public mockery of our faith in the name of art.

Yet, despite the required level of tolerance expected of us Christians, we are now expected to believe that a simple little cross or crucifix is to be considered so much more offensive than all these examples. So much so that wearing the cross or crucifix actually has to be legally banned in a court of law.

I wonder what it is going to take before all Christians come to the realisation that we are under serious attack. This is not just the mindless ranting of a group of fanatical Christians. Christianity is facing a very real threat!

Consider the words of Andrea Williams, the director of the Christian Legal Centre in the UK, who said recently that: “In recent months the courts have refused to recognise the wearing of a cross, belief in marriage between a man and a woman and Sundays as a day of worship as ‘core’ expressions of the Christian faith.”

Can we really still doubt what is taking place? Christians must begin to stand together and defend their religious liberty now. If we wait until the day when all our religious liberties are gone, we may find the road, to restoring these liberties, far longer and more arduous than we could possibly begin to imagine.

If we are in any doubt that religious liberty is at risk, just consider how the HHS mandate in the US, which is already law, will certainly destroy the Catholic Church’s religious freedom when the one year moratorium runs out.

Of course, I cannot conclude without mentioning the continued disgraceful and inexcusable silence of our only South African, allegedly Catholic newspaper, on the subject of the HHS mandate.

The Southern Cross has deliberately chosen to exclude from its pages and its website, any report on the HHS mandate. Instead, The Southern Cross has chosen to: report Vatican monetary scandals; publish incomplete articles on conscience that makes the point that contraception may in fact not be a sin; display mendacious blogs that ‘bash’ the Pope for using the term “Lord Cardinals”; publish editorials that criticise the Vatican symposium on the handling of clerical abuse; promote that “We Are All Church” has morphed, even though it still promotes the ordination of women and has ties with the international dissident movement.