Retired Anglican Bishop of Barbados Right Reverend Dr Rufus Brome has acknowledged that evil is real in the world.
Brome accepted this as a fact of life last night during an interview with Barbados TODAY team seeking some clarification on the Charlie Charlie Challenge which caused panic yesterday among students in the island’s primary and secondary school systems.
Brome, who had admitted earlier that during his long career as a senior cleric in the Anglican Church he had assisted another cleric on two occasions in driving out evil spirits from an individual, argued that it was not simply a case of the person being an evil one.
The senior cleric said: “I think we have to deal with evil systems and evil powers that are trying to work against God’s power. Within the Scriptures we read about Jesus casting out demons.
The Right Reverend Dr Rufus Brome
“Up to the 20th century, people were talking about demons as if it was a kind of primitive way of dealing with mental health. I think people are beginning to come around to see that evil is real in the world. There is an evil force working against what is good in the world.”
He suggested that part of the problem was our reluctance to come to terms with the fact that if we cast out evil we have to put something that is good in its place.
The retired cleric pointed out that the country’s failure to provide a grounding in religious knowledge in the school system and the children’s non-attendance at Sunday School had contributed to the decay in the spiritual well-being of the country.
The former bishop however declined to say that evil had overtaken the island’s youth, pointing out that the country still
had a number of young people who were very good.
“Today’s young people have to contend with many challenges. In my youth I did not have these challenges. I did not know anything about drugs in my youth. I did not know about the negative ways social media could be used, because there was none. As adults we have to be sympathetic towards our young people. We should not fail them as adults,” Brome said.
Brome told Barbados TODAY that adults must be aware of their responsibilities and with whom their children were communicating in a world that had shrunk with the widespread use of the Internet.
He said: “Parents are responsible for the training of our children. Our children are living in a world with all kinds of problems. It is not enough to tell our children that something is bad. We must be able to fill the emptiness with good.
“The home, the church and the school must assume greater responsibility at this time for the training of our youth,” he stressed.