Statement on Asia Tsunami . 10th January 2005

The Lord Bishop of St Albans:

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her initial Statement and join with everyone else in the House in expressing the profoundest sympathy for all those whose lives have been devastated by the tsunami. On behalf of these Benches and in conjunction with other Churches, I want to assure all those people of our prayers.

Noble Lords will know that all Churches throughout this country have been open, and remain open, for prayer and for the lighting of candles for hope and solidarity. It is my belief that the links between Christian Churches and people of other faiths in our country can only be strengthened by the sense of national and world solidarity that this terrible event has engendered among us.

Like other noble Lords, I believe that the response to the disaster by the people of our country has been very remarkable. Naturally we want to highlight the personal and public stories of giving to the various appeals. I think of the congregation of a very tiny rural church who raised £220 immediately, in a single collection, on top of what they normally give, and that of an urban church in Bedfordshire who gave £3,000 immediately, on top of what they normally give. I think of dioceses such as Lichfield and Ripon, in Leeds, which are already making contact with their overseas links. But it is now the long-term haul that is important, and I know that the Churches of our country will want, through CAFOD, Christian Aid and the Tearfund, as well as through their own links—and that we will all want, as far as humanly possible—to be in there for the long haul. We shall want to keep up our pressure about debt relief and fair trade. I welcome all the statements that have been made in that regard.

I shall make one pastoral comment. It hardly bears talking about in the light of the scale of the tsunami disaster, but within a couple of days after the Hatfield rail crash I had the privilege of going to the hospital to meet the hospital chaplain. He, quite rightly, took me straight away not to the chief executive of the hospital trust but to the staff in the mortuary. People in our own nation and elsewhere who work in the field of forensics and identification deserve our profoundest thanks. I hope that when they get back, somehow the appropriate pastoral care can be offered to them, not because they necessarily need it, as it were, but as an expression of our enormous gratitude to people who undertake the grimmest of tasks and do so out of profound respect for our common humanity. So I hope that our pastoral care can be expressed.

Of course, I welcome all the announcements that have been made, and have been deeply moved by the work of all those in the Government, the Armed Services, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, DfID and everywhere, who have done so much on behalf of us all. I hope that I can speak not only on behalf of all Churches in this country but, symbolically, on this occasion, not for but with all those people of other faiths, to say how much we all want to work together to create hope and bring goodness out of a most devastating event.