Open borders Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has doubled down on his decision to use his Easter sermon this year to openly attack the government’s asylum policy.
Archbishop Welby, the de facto leader of the Church of England (CoE), said on Easter Sunday that the Boris Johnson administration’s still-unimplemented plan to transfer some male migrants arriving illegally by boat from France — a safe European Union member-state — to Rwanda while their often bogus asylum claims are processed was “opposite of the nature of God”.
The top Anglican, presiding over an established church whose rapidly diminishing lay membership is completely at odds with its woke senior clergy on immigration, Brexit, and related issues, was criticised by Conservative parliamentarians for his partisan intervention in the Channel crisis debate, but only doubled down in an article for the notionally right-leaning Telegraph.
“The Church of England is not a passive observer of migration policy,” Welby declared.
“We welcome and serve asylum seekers at every level of society – from providing housing, food banks, social support and friendship, to scrutinising legislation in the Lords,” he said, referring to the fact that senior Anglican clergy sit in the Upper House of Parliament as lawmakers.
“Government and Church are not the same, but we must surely all want to put humanity and fairness at the heart of our asylum system. That is why the Church has called for safe and legal routes for asylum seekers, making visas available for humanitarian reasons, and helping families to be reunited,” he added, in remarks that will be interpreted by many as proposing to “tackle” illegal boat crossings by letting the same migrants come to Britain by “safe and legal routes” instead; broaden the grounds on which people can assert asylum-like rights to settle in Britain, and increase chain migration to Britain — as French president Emmanuel Macron wants.
Archbishop Welby also looked ahead to a time when “hundreds of millions more people [are] displaced in the coming decades” by the “climate crisis”, suggesting that Britain “lead the world in reimagining a truly global asylum system, where every nation takes its fair share of people” – numbers were got outlined — “desperately in search” of not only “safety”, which is obviously available in France, but the much woollier “chance of living a good life”.
Climate change is another pet subject of the clergyman, alongside mass migration, gender politics, and racial and sexual identity — although he recently got himself into trouble by pushing his rhetoric on it too far, predicting that it would cause an “infinitely greater” genocide than the Holocaust and predicting that politicians who fail to act on it will be judged “in far stronger terms” than Adolf Hitler’s appeasers.
“It’s never right to make comparisons with the atrocities brought by the Nazis, and I’m sorry for the offence caused to Jews by these words,” he grovelled when forced into his inevitable apology by the predictable backlash to these words.