Bigotry! Bigotry! Quackety Quack!

You won’t like this – not at all!

How often, if you speak out against homosexualism (no, not homosexuality) or any other pressure-group, do you hear the duckspeak: Some of my best friends are……….

No! No! No!

I have no friends whom I know to be actively homosexual;.

whom I know to be rich. I am poorish, and do not like the rich;

whom I know to be deep ecologists. They are mad;

whom I know to be in favour of abortion – need I explain why?

I have no friends whom I know to be religious Jews, only because religious Jews choose their friends from among their co-religionists. Does that make them bigots, speaking duckspeakfully? I think not.

I had a friend, who was a Jew and I think privately a Chasidic Jew, though he dressed like an Englishman. We were in business together and every week he would invite me and a couple of other Catholics to a debating society which met weekly in the Bloomsbury Hotel. It sounded very boring, and too much like school, so I always pleaded the need to go home to my family. Later it emerged that the society was Jewish and seeking converts. Had I known I would certainly have gone for the chance to learn, question, and argue. I approve totally of missionary activity.

I guess he was a bigot, too, because he was devoutly religious, a family man, and would never have accepted that the Messiah has already come. His reasons were, for him, rational.

I had a number of Muslim Arab friends when I worked in the End of London. One, the chef at my favourite restaurant, was called Ossama. They were witty (in English, too. I know no Arabic), clever, well educated, and knew far more about European history that the average English person. They also were out, sometimes very subtly, sometimes openly, to bring in converts. Good for them! I did my best to present Catholicism to them, but without success.

One of them told me that Allah would forgive me if I killed my father, mother, brother, or sister, but not if I continued to say that He had a Son. Very bigoted, but for him, rational.

I am choosy about my friends – and enemies, for I, too, am duckspeakingly a bigot.

A bigot is someone who knows or thinks he has the truth. He then acts in accordance with it.

To be Catholic is to believe that only Christ saves, and that he does so through His Church, whether the person to be saved is Catholic or not. That is what I understand to be the truth of “no Salvation outside the Church”.

Unacceptable bigotry!

Quack! Quack!