BY an odd coincidence, Hal G.P. Colebatch's excellent article "UK bill an attack on faith" appeared in yesterday's The Australian about five days after I had the pleasure of delivering the annual St Edmund Campion lecture at Sydney's Campion College.
Colebatch's moving piece explained why it may soon become illegal to hang a cross in any Catholic school in Britain and asks advisedly what sort of intolerant world postmodernist totalitarianism is creating.
Anyone familiar with Elizabethan history in Britain may recall that Campion was tortured and executed in 1581 for trying to keep alive the old faith - Catholicism - in Britain after Henry VIII's historic rift with Rome in 1533.
The substance of my talk, which was called "Are we truly evolving? Reflections on the life of an Elizabethan saint", touched on the creeping influence of postmodernist totalitarianism throughout the Western world rather than only in Britain.
Anyone who has read Evelyn Waugh's biography of Campion will understand something of the extraordinary heroism through which he and scores of other martyred priests - plus thousands of devout laypeople - struggled to keep what they regarded as the true, historic Christian faith alive in Britain.
Now, instead of finding itself persecuted by Elizabethan spies, informers and hangmen, Catholicism finds itself under severe assault from the self-righteous, politically correct social engineers of Britain's political Left.
Thankfully the same thing has yet to happen in Australia, but with the increasing politicisation of public education here by an ideologically driven Marxist Left, something very similar may not be far away. Read more.