The Archbishop of Canterbury is using his Christmas sermon to tell the public to welcome illegal migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats and praise Border Force personnel and volunteers helping to ferry them across.
Archbishop Justin Welby, the de facto leader of England’s established church, is well known for his political and generally “woke” activism, hailing the European Union as “the greatest dream realised for human beings since the fall of the Western Roman Empire” following the Brexit referendum, denouncing his “white advantage” and “straight advantage” and declaring he was “ashamed of our history” during the Black Lives Matter unrest in 2020, and orchestrating a witch-hunt for supposedly offensive statues and memorials in Church buildings, for example.
The Anglican cleric is not above weaponising the Christian faith in his political pronouncements — recently asserting that getting vaccinated is a “moral issue” and implying that the unvaccinated do not “love one another as Jesus said”, for example — and is using his Christmas Day sermon this year to advance his pet cause of open borders, according to multiple reports.
“There is no doubting our human capacity to solve problems and show great kindness. The volunteers welcoming and caring for refugees arriving on the beaches so close to this cathedral are amazing people, especially the crews of the RNLI [Royal National Lifeboat Institution] and the other rescuers such as the Border Patrol cutters’ crews,” he will say at the Eucharist service in Canterbury Cathedral, according to the left-wing Guardian, which appears to have been given a copy of the sermon.
Archbishop Welby will also argue that the story of Christ’s birth “shows us how we must treat those who are unlike us, who have far less than us, who have lived with the devastating limits of war and national tragedy – those who risk everything to arrive on the beaches”.
Boat migrants are not fleeing war-torn countries, of course, but France and Belgium — prosperous member-states of the European Union, which the archbishop did not want Britain to leave.
Previously, the archbishop has taken to the national press to lecture the public on “Welcoming strangers to our country” and tell them that “We must be generous and allow ourselves to change with the newcomers and create a deeper, richer way of life.”
Anglican churchgoers do not appear to share the woke cleric’s enthusiasm for mass migration, however, with research published by the University of Bristol in 2018 indicating that 87.6 per cent want to see immigration reduced.
Church attendance is, perhaps not coincidentally, declining rapidly.
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