Inquiry’s treatment of bishop was bizarre, says MP
By Ed West
28 March 2008

A member of the Parliamentary Children, Schools and Families Committee has criticised the "bizarre" way that the group treated Bishop Patrick O'Donoghue of Lancaster when he appeared before it this month.

Douglas Carswell, Conservative MP for Harwich and Clacton, was responding to an email sent by Daphne McLeod, chairman of orthodox Catholic education group Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice.

She wrote the email to five of the MPs on the committee criticising the aggressive manner in which they treated the bishop.

Mrs McLeod wrote: "I am shocked that in this country which boasts it upholds freedom of worship and freedom of speech, you have the temerity to call a Catholic bishop to account for teaching the Faith in his Catholic schools - which are financially supported in part by his Catholic flock.

"I understand you are protesting because he will not allow explicit lessons on sex, covering all the perversions, to be given to children in mixed classes in his schools.

"Are you aware that in protecting the children in his care from this abuse, he is only following the guidance of the Universal Catholic Church?

"That over a billion Catholics and many other people alive today agree with Bishop O'Donoghue, including the Catholic voters in this country?

"That today's insistence on thrusting sex on children in the classroom is a very recent phenomenon which has proved disastrous and which would have been considered an outrage in more enlightened ages? Surely it is not too late to apologise to the Bishop and cancel this charade."

Mr Carswell, one of four Conservatives on the 14-man committee, replied: "I'm afraid that I rather agree with you in that I felt some of the questioning was not good.

"Certain questions told us more about the prejudices of the questioner than anything else. Secular extremism is as unattractive as any. I support the role of faith schools - and think that politicians should leave them alone. I rather suspect that one reason why politicians are so hostile to faith schools is precisely because it is less easy for hectoring politicians to boss them about and micro-manage them.

"I tried to throw in a couple of questions that would allow the bishop to respond and make his point. He seemed to be hectored in a way that any objective viewer would find bizarre."

Bishop O'Donoghue was asked to give evidence to an inquiry by the House of Commons Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families after his Fit for Mission? document attacked "values-free" sex education in schools. The committee objected to this, as well as his instructions to remove books that "contain polemic against religion in general" from school libraries, including works by Karl Marx, Albert Camus and Philip Pullman.

Fit for Mission? also instructs Catholic schools not to present "the secular view on sex outside marriage, contraception, sexually transmitted diseases, including Aids and abortion" as "neutral information".

Huddersfield MP Barry Sheerman, an outspoken critic of Catholic education, leads the committee. He has said that "faith education works all right as long as people are not that serious about their faith. But as soon as there is a more doctrinaire attitude questions have to be asked."

Bishop O'Donoghue told the committee that "every school has a philosophy, and a philosophy which puts God at the centre and morality as objective is no less powerful than that which God is irrelevant and morality is up to the individual choice".

Mr Carswell said he was inundated with angry emails after the treatment of the Bishop, but felt sympathetic to the sentiments.

"I got 15 or 20 emails almost immediately, saying 'how dare you question the Bishop like that!' I thought the committee's treatment of him was a bit OTT, a couple of the people overstepped the boundary.

"I tried to come to his defence, by asking the Bishop whether he would be questioned like this if he was a Muslim imam. I'm not a Catholic, but I thought that some of the members in the way they spoke to him were out of line."

"I think he was slightly taken aback, and I felt slightly embarrassed. I give people a hard time, but only if they are on the public payroll, a recipient of public money, in the civil service or quangos - they're fair game. But otherwise - if they're members of civic society - they're kind of guests. He wouldn't have got that sort of treatment if he were an imam."