by Allison Pearson
In 2018, when the Reverend Matthew Firth took up his new post at St Cuthbert’s, the church which has been at the heart of the north-eastern market town of Darlington since the 12th century, he was eager to bring new souls to the faith he passionately believes in.
It didn’t take long, however, for Matthew to figure out that there was something suspicious about the large number of souls from the Middle East who were queuing up to be converted to Christianity.
“When I arrived, lots of adult baptisms were already booked in, which was highly unusual. The vast majority, if not all of them, were asylum seekers who had already failed in their initial application for asylum. Clearly, if you were rejected, the next step was to book in for baptism,” Matthew told me on Thursday on the phone from his home in York.
All of the candidates for baptism at St Cuthbert’s were men, mainly from Iran and Syria. The new vicar decided to allow some of the services to go ahead – “I felt I had to honour them, I wasn’t going to just cancel” – but, when they took place, he says the baptisms felt like a kind of performance.
“I got the distinct impression that people were trying to put on a sense of emotion that their baptism had happened, So, when the photos are taken, it looks as though they’re absolutely overwhelmed with emotion. To create a situation where it looks as though this is totally above board and genuine.”
Usually, the relatives of the newly baptised take a few discreet photos. A vast number of pictures were taken at the baptisms of the asylum seekers. To the astonished reverend, it looked like a professional job. “All of a sudden, literally, a couple of hours later, you’d spot on Facebook that all of their Facebook banner pictures and profile pictures have been changed to the baptism photos. All of them, just flooded with baptism photos.
“And, again, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is to present a case. It’s to say, ‘Look at my Facebook profile! It’s full of Christian stuff. I’m a genuine Christian.’ But this was literally overhauling a Facebook profile to create a new brand [for themselves].”
Money has changed hands
The Cambridge astrophysics graduate, who left the Church of England in 2020 and is now a vicar for the Free Church of England, realised he had stumbled upon “a conveyor belt, a veritable industry of asylum baptisms”. It was a blatant transaction.
As Matthew recalls, “There was one particular individual who was a Muslim who had gained permission to stay in England. He wasn’t seeking baptism himself, because he’d been granted asylum. And he was always around, and he would bring cohorts of these people seeking asylum to the church. It would usually be after the service.
“So, I’d be at the back shaking hands with the regular congregation as they were leaving, and this Muslim guy would bring these people to me and he would immediately say, ‘These want baptism, these want baptism, these want baptism’.”
On occasions, Matthew claims he even saw money changing hands. “I observed things, you know, quietly slipping in the pocket, people slipping him money.”
Good grief. You mean actual physical cash? “Yeah, I saw that happening. Now, it’s obviously never as overt as, ‘Here you go, here’s the money, get me baptised.’ But you see people going away into corners and slipping money to the middleman who is bringing loads of them into the church.”
Once the asylum seekers had ticked baptism off them How to Win the Right to Stay in Britain list, approaches were made to Matthew to provide evidence for an immigration tribunal that their conversion to Christianity was genuine…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (msn.com)
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