The following is a letter from Father John Pearce – Parish Priest at St Brigid’s, Marrickville (the largest church in our region) to Australian MP’s

Together with two local Anglican Priests and some members of our three Parishes, on Thursday 5th June I travelled by bus convoy to Canberra for a Rally in support of Sheikh Mansour Leghaei.

Mansour is an Imam neighbour of mine and President of our Marrickville Inter-Faith Round Table.  He will be deported in 3 weeks unless our Federal Government backs down. He has been given a negative assessment by ASIO after 16 years of peaceful work in the community. He is the only fluent English speaking Imam in Sydney. He preaches in English, thus has a large young multicultural Islamic Community. Our convoy of 14 buses from Sydney and Melbourne had many young people as our hosts and leaders. If our Christian Churches had such numbers of young people, we would be overflowing with good Disciples.

After standing in Solidarity with yesterday outside Parliament, I found a lot of the young people talk in gratitude on the bus back, and of how much he has influenced their lives and the lives of others. It was most inspiring. I now look forward to inviting some of them here for a dinner conversation with some of our young people for the St Brigid’s Parish 2nd Annual Ifta Dinner I will host in August.

Despite approaches to the PM’s office, neither he nor any of his ministers were available to join us on the lawns opposite Parliament. Neither did the Opposition. The local Greens Candidate for Grayndler at least travelled with us and participated. Also, the AFP informed us that neither the Sheikh nor rally participants could enter the Parliamentary Building to even hand his letter of appeal to the Front Desk. The young people did such a great job with crowd movement, the AFP had little to do.

As you may know, one of my concerns is this comes 90 years after a Passionist Priest from my Parish of Marrickville was deported for opposing conscription during WWI, as did many of our Bishops and citizens. He was German born, British educated, finished school at Parramatta, yet deemed a threat to the State. While his father became a British subject, he forgot to put his son and wife on the papers. After internment at Holsworthy where he acted as Chaplain to other Internees, he was deported and lived the next 7years in USA and England. (The weren’t afraid of him). He died in London in 1928.  His name was Fr Charles Jerger CP (google that for good reports).

The Sheikh asks for natural justice, ie, to know what he is accused of and the right to defend himself in law. He has been told that as a non citizen, he does not have any of those rights. But we know he has human and God given rights.

Meanwhile, the UN has asked for a stay on deportation so that they can investigate this case. We wait on that.

As a life long Labour voter, yesterday I found myself joining the chant of Shame Rudd Shame. I now wonder how I should vote at the next election. The days of the Whitlam Government in 1972-75 were short, but at least that PM brought social justice into the open and applied it.

We seem to have reverted to being a secret society once again.

Thanks for reading this. I pray that we become a country where true justice is given to all people, citizen and non citizen, as they are all God’s children.

Perhaps you might like to write to the PM. His deportation date is June 27.

John
Fr John Pearce CP
Parish Priest

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