WHERE ARE YOU COMING FROM?

Before the last war Peter Drucker heard in Germany a nazi party official explaining to a crowd in the street, "We don't want high bread prices. We don't want low bread prices. We don't want the same bread prices. We want national socialist bread prices."

Mad? Certainly, but for me understandably mad.

A wise African is said to have remarked to a Christian missionary, "How can I hear what you say, when what you are is deafening me?"

Not mad, but perfectly understandable.

St Paul exhorted the early Christians to be submissive to the magistrates, because their authority is ultimately derived from God. (Somebody please give me the reference, because I'm temporarily without a New Testament in English.)

Maybe I'm a leetle bit heretical, but I have never been able to accept what St Paul said here. After all, Jesus described Satan as the prince of this world. I will obey wise and just laws, made by a wise, just, and good government (in a sense acceptable to my Catholic conscience). Laws made by moral aliens are facts, like gravity, to be circumvented, frustrated, subverted, overcome.

If I were to live in a future Caliphate of Europe, I would regard it as a duty to eat pork, drink alcohol, and do anything else I safely could to undermine the government.

As I have already said, I admire devout Muslims, but not their religion.

I have a great affection for Jews I have known, but if I were forced (yes, highly unlikely) to live in a future Hassidic state, I would spend much of my time drinking pork and lobster milk-shakes. And being outrageously Catholic.

Prim parliamentary killjoys in the UK make normal people (like me) want to be drunk as owls and smoke like chimneys.

The UK is not just a secular state - it countenances religions only insofar as it may be a useful tool of control, viz Blair's 'Faith Foundation'. It is in effect anti-religious. Those of a religious persuasion who live under it should, like Hotspur, "cavil at the ninth part of a hair".

His Holiness has called for us Catholics to be a creative minority, and I hope many of us are.

I would add to that, we should be a disruptive minority, and endeavour to make sure that anti-Catholic, anti-life, evil government cannot work.

We should not be following the example of the English Hierarchy in cosying up to those powerful and prestigious interests which are seeking the destruction of the family, childhood innocence, authentic religion (by describing it as culture), and all inconvenient morality.

Thank God I have the good fortune to live in Poland, where abortion is almost non-existent, and both Church and family are strong and resilient. Here I can be that bizarre creature - a patriotic non-Pole. I can comfortably respect the law, police, and judges.

Ultimately, however, I am a citizen of my own skin, owing allegiance only to God, to the Church, to those I love, and to the Truth.