Today is All Souls Day in the Roman Catholic Church, the day when our prayer focus is on the souls in purgatory. In the Roman Catholic faith one’s soul goes through a purgation in a condition called purgatory, when the church militant on Earth prays for the church suffering in purgatory. This is a prerequisite before they join the rest of the church triumphant in heaven.

This year, All Souls Day comes against the backdrop of the 500th anniversary of former German monk Martin Luther posting his 95 theses to a church door on October 31, 1517. This was basically a protest against the doctrine of purgatory and the abuse of the sale of indulgences. It signalled the beginning of Protestantism.

Here in Jamaica, All Soul’s Day 2017 coincides with reflections on the results of three by-elections for seats in the House of Representatives that took place this past Monday. The Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP) Dr Norman Dunn won the St Mary South Eastern constituency, formerly held by the late Dr Winston Green of the People’s National Party (PNP). This means that the JLP now has 33 seats in the House to the PNP’s 30. As expected, Mark Golding and Angela Brown Burke retained the St Andrew Southern and St Andrew South Western seats for the PNP.

In celebrating the JLP victory in St. Mary South Eastern, Prime Minister Andrew Holness said that the only referendum in the election was on whether people who are not citizens should contest elections. So it was not a referendum on Holness’s Administration, despite what Dr Peter Phillips said.

Was Andrew Holness also making reference to those within the JLP who thought that it was a referendum on their strength within the JLP to challenge him for leadership? The main campaign organisers in St Mary South Eastern did not support Holness when Audley Shaw challenged his leadership in 2013.

The selling of indulgences four centuries ago to build St Peter’s Basilica was an abuse, and the Roman Catholic Church has long recognised that. But to remove the doctrine of purgatory as Martin Luther chose to do was to ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’. The good about the Protestant Reformation is that it caused a purgation in the church generally referred to as the Renaissance of the Reformation. Clarification of doctrine and laws to stop abuse were hammered out at the Council of Trent.

Similarly, there should be a purgation in our political system as it encourages ‘garrison’ constituencies with all its terrible consequences. But one should not throw out the political system altogether. The main type of medicine that is needed is to do away with constituency representation in Parliament as it is presently structured, and replace it with proportional representation.

All representation of the people should be done through the municipal councils; two from each council with one each allotted to the major political parties. The system I propose is one where we have 81 Members of Parliament in a unicameral legislature — 28 representatives from the municipal councils and 53 elected proportionally.

The party that gets the most votes should have 30 of the 53 proportional representatives, and the remaining 23 should be distributed as 18 to the party that came second and the other five to the other parties and independents that ran in the elections, with those people choosing the five among themselves.

In reality, when the representatives from the councils are added, the majority party would have 44 of the 81 seats, the Opposition party would have 36 and the other parties and independents would have five. I doubt that the parliamentarians will do anything but talk in terms of changing the system. There has to be a strong demand for it by the people of Jamaica, just as self-government was demanded from the 1930s until 1944 when it was granted.

Housing was a tool that was abused by the political parties. The first attempts at housing in Jamaica were the self-help system done by Jamaica Welfare. The Roman Catholic Church, in Homestead, Bamboo, in St Ann, built the first housing scheme in Jamaica. The principle here was to develop families, and that families need homes and homes need houses.

The Government of Jamaica got into housing with the development of ‘government yard’ in Trench Town to provide relief after Hurricane Charlie hit Jamaica in 1951. Then came the housing schemes of the 1950s in places like Mona Heights, Blue Castle, Harbour View, and Duhaney Park. By the middle of the 1960s, houses were packed with supporters of the party in power, and in the 1970s the other party, when elected to govern, did the same.

Guns, bombs and fire were used to manipulate the democratic system by the housing of voters in constituencies to bring about a favourable electoral result. And this is how the ‘garrison’ constituencies were created. Then, unfortunately, violence by the gun took on a life of its own and the politicians were no longer in full control of the guns.

If one believes the German monk, Martin Luther, all of our sins including those of the politicians in this country who have created garrison politics in Jamaica can only be forgiven if they all repent while still alive. According to Roman Catholic faith, we can pray for the dead, which is in line with 2nd Maccabees 12: 46, “It is a good and wholesome thing to pray for the dead.”

The Roman Catholic Bible consists of 73 books, seven of which were removed by the King James Version of the Bible done by the Church of England or Anglican Church. And the first and second books of Maccabees are two of the seven books that are not found in most Protestant versions of the Bible.

While the word “purgatory’ is not found in the Bible, there are allusions to it — and not only in Maccabees. It was Jesus Christ who said: “Blasphemy against God can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either in this world or the next,” (Matthew 12: 32) implying that other sins can be forgiven in the next world.

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