Six hard questions about how those in GB see NI unionists

Deputy Lord Mayor of Belfast Tom Haire, Fr Martin Magill and Archbishop Justin Welby.

‘An honour to call Pope Francis a friend and brother’ Archbishop of Canterbury tells Belfast audience

This morning a letter from Mr Alan Carson appears  in the ‘Belfast Newsletter’ which read as follows:

Six hard questions about how those in GB see NI unionists

A letter from Alan Carson:

I have just scanned hundreds of posts by fellow unionists on social media about the Bloody Sunday commemoration walk, questioning why the media is so biased against us.

In which the media was lampooned for not giving equal coverage to Bloody Friday, Enniskillen, La Mon, Darkley, Kingsmill or the Shankill Bomb.

Personally speaking, I would be asking some more challenging questions: 

Why don’t the mainland British people warm to unionist concerns?

Why do they continue to consider unionism, not nationalism, as the cause of the Troubles?

Why do they perennially empathise with nationalists?

Why have we not convinced them that our cause is just?

Why do they consider us as Irish when we have shed our blood to remain British?

And, why do our friends on the mainland no longer identify with the likes of us?

I felt that I had to respond to this letter and I sent off the following to the Letter’s Page of the  ‘Belfast Newsletter’.

Please pray that it might be printed and not ignored as my last letter was.

Dear Sir

May I be permitted to suggest an answer to the very astute and pertinent questions asked by your correspondent, Mr Alan Carson – (Six hard questions about how those in GB see NI unionists.)

I sincerely believe that once Protestant Britain has departed from its spiritual foundations quite some time ago.

The main churches have, under the influence of the ‘Ecumenical Movement’ of which they are all a part, drifted away from their credal and confessional bedrock and have essentially embraced the doctrines of Roman Catholicism.

Nothing illustrated this better than the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in an address in St Peter’s Roman  Catholic Cathedral in west Belfast on the Sabbath past.

A report in the press of the service says: ‘The leader of the Anglican Church has described Pope Francis as “a friend and brother” in an address delivered at St Peter’s Catholic Cathedral in west Belfast on Sunday’.

That in most people’s eyes is anything but startling and novel. However, in the light of Holy Scripture and in the light of the 39 Articles of Anglicanism, which were born out of the Reformation, what he is saying is utterly contemptible! Reformed doctrine does not consider the Pope as a Christian.

This signifies a change of doctrine and a seismic shift of religious thinking on the part of the leader of the Anglican Church and all those allied with him, away from the Reformed Faith toward Roman Catholicism.

For this reason the propaganda of Irish Republicanism with its picture of the ‘poor downtrodden Roman Catholic’ is readily embraced by those who have part in this shift in religious thinking on the mainland. Unionism, with its links to Protestantism is therefore deemed alien, out of date, archaic and to be utterly rejected.

That is the answer to all the ‘WHYs’ raised by Mr Carson.

Respectfully,
Rev Ivan Foster (Rtd)

Update Feb 10, 2022: THE EDITOR OF THE “BELFAST NEWSLETTER” HAS CHOSEN TO IGNORE THIS LETTER!