LEICESTER, United Kingdom – A senior priest in the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales told members of the British Parliament that clergy do their best to “unpack” Baptism requests but that it is all but impossible to discern a person’s “experience of faith” – and thereby know for sure if they are being entirely genuine in their bid to join the Church.
The Home Affairs select committee was meeting to discuss the possibility that asylum seekers were being baptised in order to stay in the United Kingdom.
It followed evidence earlier this year that 40 migrants on board the Bibby Stockholm – a vessel holding about 500 people while their asylum claims are processed – were seeking to become Christian. There was also the case earlier this year of the Clapham chemical attack on a woman and her daughters in which there were concerns that the suspect had been assisted in his asylum application by a clergy member.
Father Christopher Thomas, general secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, was asked by the committee if those who receive Baptism continue to participate in the Church.
“It would be incumbent on every priest to have an interview, a formal interview in many respects, with the person who is seeking Baptism,” the priest said. “In that process you would unpack their position, of where they’ve come from, if they were asylum seekers, for instance…There is a sense of real engagement,” he added.
“To say everyone who receives baptism as an adult and then continues on in the Church, you can’t say whether that will happen…we are all human and people will have difference experiences of faith,” Thomas said.
Father Matthew Firth, a former Church of England priest now with the Free Church of England, told the Daily Telegraph in February that he personally witnessed 20 cases of failed asylum seekers requesting Baptism, and he believes there are thousands more cases.
Speaking to the Home Affairs committee, Firth said “all” of those asylum seekers sought a Baptism during the appeal stage.
“I think some of them are in very difficult situations and they are seeing baptism as a ticket to something whether that it’s true or not,” he said.
The committee was told by the Anglican Bishop of Chelmsford, the Iranian-born Eleanor “Guli” Francis-Dehqani, that the numbers accusing asylum seekers of false baptisms “don’t quite add up to me”.
“I have spoken to clergy who have turned people down [for baptism] because they did not feel they met the criteria,” she said, adding the Church of England clergy take Baptism “very seriously”.
However, she acknowledged the Church “is not infallible”, adding: “We are a human institution, errors may be made.”
She also said that Church decisions should not be judged “on the basis of a couple of negative cases”.
“I think it is dangerous to use a couple of examples to criticise a whole system especially when it’s not the Church’s responsibility to assess the veracity of the asylum claim,” she said.
Home Office Minister Tom Pursglove told the committee that Christian conversion was “not a determinative factor” in the decision-making process for granting asylum, and that the “credibility associated to that” is weighed within the decision-making process “amongst a range of other factors, relevant to each individual case”.
He added: “What we are dealing with in terms of this hearing today, it strikes me as a subset of a subset. What we are seeing is that the vast majority of individuals where Christian conversion is a factor are saying that they have converted at that initial reporting stage.”
Open Doors UK publishes a list of 50 countries where Christians face persecution, with the top ten being North Korea, Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, Yemen, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan, Iran and Afghanistan. Photo: Migrants arrive in port after being picked up in the English Channel by the UK’s Border Force, Dover, England, 14 April 2022. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.)
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