We Must Try Everything For Christ

…Yes even establishing the CSM in Gibraltar! This is indeed Good News! Gibraltar, you must understand, is a very small country with a population of thirty thousand, but we have all or perhaps nearly all the ‘complications’ of any average sized country.
We have our Gibraltar Parliament with seventeen elected members. We have virtually all the Churches that you would find in any European country, with our two Cathedrals, the Catholic and the Anglican holding places of prominence in the heart of town, together with other churches of all the established Christian denominations and various smaller Evangelical groups. There is a strong Hebrew community and they have their synagogues. Gibraltar also has a Moroccan community with their mosques.
We have a very busy land frontier, an airport, a Cruise Liner Terminal, our own Royal Gibraltar Police Force, the Royal Gibraltar Regiment, facilities for the Royal Navy within Harbour. We have all the various levels of education except that our students usually go to the UK to cater for their university requirements! We must also mention our Finance Centre, Civil Service, Trade Unions, not forgetting, of course, our very own Magistrates and Supreme Courts; the Chamber of Commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses and so forth. We also have a strong and thriving Private Sector.
Yes, we have nearly all the ‘complications’ of any average sized country.
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I joined the Christian Socialist Movement soon after I was elected into Parliament in 2003 as a member of the Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party (GSLP) and I am still, as I write, a Member of Parliament.
I was delighted when the Leader of the GSLP, The Hon Fabian Picardo MP asked me to spear-head the establishing of the CSM here in Gibraltar. I believe it is extremely important if not essential to be a Christian Socialist in order to make his or her contribution to the CSM more effective than it might otherwise be. But we shall be as flexible as we possibly can. An interest in politics, of course, is important, but you certainly do not have to be a member of the GSLP or indeed the Labour Party to join the CSM.

What ? Politics and Religion don’t mix? Nonsense! I simply cannot un-mix them!
If you were to ask me to sum what I believe in and what I stand for I would have to answer:
“My religion is Catholic/Christian; my spirituality is Biblical, and my political philosophy is Socialist”
A few years ago I was touched when I came across something written by James Keir Hardie, ‘From Serfdom to Socialism’ (1907):
“This generation has grown up ignorant of the fact that socialism is as old as the human race. When civilization dawned upon the world, primitive man was living his rude communistic life, sharing things in common with every member of the tribe. Later when they lived in villages, man, the communist, moved about among the communal flocks and herds on communal land. The peoples who have carved their names most deeply on the tables of the human story all set their conquering career as communists, and their downward path begins with the day when they finally turned away from it and began to gather personal possessions! When the old civilizations were putrefying, the still small voice of Jesus the communist stole over the earth like a soft refreshing breeze carrying healing wherever it went.”
My Christian faith as a Catholic is what inspired me to become a politician, because fundamental to that Christian faith is the distinction between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, in other words the distinction between Church and State. However the autonomy of the temporal sphere belongs to the State which in turn recognises the harmony and freedom of religious practice. All of us, politicians, should understand if I may say so, that what we are involved in is surely much more than just some kind of mechanism for defining rules and regulations. WE must inevitably face the question of how true Justice can be achieved and delivered here and now for the people we serve. ( The ideas in this last paragraph are largely taken for Pope Benedict’s first encyclical letter ‘Deus Caritas Est’)
WE MUST TRY EVERYTHING FOR CHRIST, yes, even establishing the Christian Socialist Movement here in Gibraltar! We must hope everything for Christ; that has to be the true Christian attitude, because if we genuinely believe and do nothing, then ‘we of all people are the most to be pitied’
The Church has always maintained that justice must be applied to every sphere of life and as Pope Benedict said recently, “Man is not a lost atom in a random universe” he has a purpose and I am sure that the CSM will help us find our way as Christians through the complicated web of all our political activities.
(Author: The Hon. Charles Bruzon MP)

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