Scottish Catholic Observer

Bishop Stephen Robson of Dunkeld has told Scottish politicians to sympathetic to those struggling to come to terms the effects of Scotland’s rapid cultural change.

Delivering the Time for Reflection in the Scottish Parliament today, Bishop Robson  said that cultural change ‘has arguably been Scottish Society’s greatest challenge in the last decade.’ He urged legislators to ‘be compassionate about the effects of change’ as not everyone can ‘absorb it at the same rate—with some changes leaving many people, including the elderly, straggling behind.’

The bishop said his 90-year-old father had been so overwhelmed by the drastic pace of change in the modern world that he’d told him  ‘Son, I’m glad to be on the way out.’

“It wasn’t terrorist violence or the threats of war that caused him to feel like this, but rather the endless cultural changes in contemporary society,” he said. “It brought home to me that my father, and countless others like him, are in culture shock.”

In the last decade, cultural change has arguably been Scottish society’s greatest challenge, Bishop Robson said, adding it was the ‘increased pace of those changes— that have left many people, and not only the elderly, straggling behind.’

He told MSPs that at a time when ‘all the world’s social challenges and cultural problems appear as if they are in sprouting in our own back yard we just can’t tackle them all at once; we need time to absorb change, if culture shock is to be avoided.’

“Each one of us constructs our reality from the building blocks that our parents, families, communities and society provide us with,” he said. “Of course, there are times when our understanding of reality must be challenged. But please may you as legislators be compassionate about the effects of change; not everyone can absorb it at the same rate. There will always be the wayfarers, the stragglers and the reluctant and the downright stubborn: win minds and hearts first rather than coerce by force of law.”

Finally he urged lawmakers to ‘be mindful that for believers, man-made positive law, such as made in this chamber, can bind bodies, but not souls.’

“For if, perchance, positive law is found to be in serious opposition to God’s Law, or to the natural Law written on human hearts, then God’s laws will always trump man’s,” he said. “This is the first lesson in religious freedom. ‘What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but to lose his soul?’”

— Read Bishop Robson’s address at the Scottish Parliamemnt in full in Friday December 18 SCO in parishes.

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