Diocesan Press Release

Jubilee Candle dedicated in Southwark Cathedral

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  16 November 1998

"A fifth of the world’s people are suffering because of unpayable debts owed by their countries. One child every second is born into debt which will affect their health care and education." With these words the Bishop of Southwark lit a Jubilee 2000 candle in Southwark Cathedral on Sunday November 15.

The Rt Rev Tom Butler dedicated the candle as a focus for prayer for those peoples enslaved in unrepayable debt. The candle, set in a solid lump of rock encircled with a heavy chain, will burn there every day until the Millennium.

The dedication of the Jubilee Candle followed a service of Evensong which specially marked the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Bishop spoke in his sermon of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. He said that the unlocking of that cosmic power left us unsure how to live in a new world. "Peace was suddenly on the agenda of mankind in a totally new way, not for merely ethical or theological reasons but because only through living in peace could mankind now survive. Such was the womb which gave birth to the United Nations over 50 years ago."

The UN has not solved all the world’s problems, he continued, but "It has seen adopted in countries all around the globe its Declaration of Human Rights, one of the first fruits of the fledgling UN’s work."

The Declaration of Human Rights challenges a market driven approach to human life, he said. "It insists that if people live in degradation and inhumanity, someone is to blame - those who profit from the situation. And if to us the Declaration seems blindingly obvious, to many millions around the globe it is a dream to pursue, a dream made all the harder by the chains of debt and impotence which cripple them and make the achievement of human rights for all a hollow hope."

Ends.