In his Easter Sunday message, given at Durham Cathedral, Rt Rev Tom Wright issued a rallying call to all faiths to object to the “1984-style” proposals.
As pressure from religious leaders mounted on prime minister Gordon Brown to allow a free vote on the issue of embryo research in the Commons, Bishop Wright warned that society was in danger of learning nothing from the “dark tyrannies” of the last century.
He told his congregation: “Our present government has been pushing through, hard and fast, legislation that comes from a militantly atheist and secularist lobby. “In this 1984-style world, we create our own utopia by our own efforts, particularly our science and technology.
“The irony is that this secular utopianism is based on a belief in an unstoppable human ability to make a better world, while at the same time it believes that we have the right to kill unborn children and surplus old people, and to play games with the humanity of those in between.
“Gender-bending was so last century; we now do species-bending.
“It shouldn’t just be Roman Catholics who are objecting. It ought to be Anglicans and Presbyterians and Baptists and Russian Orthodox and Pentecostals and all other Christians, and Jews and Muslims as well.”
BBC report of Bishop Tom Wright’s Easter Day sermon
Dear bishops, get your sermons out on your own diocesan websites.
How do we know that this is an accurate report of what you said? A bishop who relies on the BBC to communicate with his people cannot wonder at the hurt and confusion that flock experiences when the BBC’s interpretation introduces distortions. We want to read the whole sermon in order to see how all this ethics fits within the theology, that is, how the resurrection frees us from the fears of which this legislation is the expression. Sermons of this sort should be simultaneously pastoral letters read from every pulpit at each mass on the Sunday they are issued.
