"I can't breathe"- The handcuffing of a murder victim & the death of our culture.
The New English Catholic' with Gavin Ashenden.Show Notes
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(Henry Nowak was an 18-year-old British university student who was murdered by Vickrum Digwa on 3 December 2025 in Southampton England. Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh, cut and stabbed Nowak a total of five times using a knife. When police arrived, Digwa accused Nowak of assault, and they handcuffed Nowak. Nowak died shortly after being handcuffed, begging the police to believe he had been stabbed. Shortly before the stabbing, Nowak had filmed Digwa walking away from him, during a verbal altercation. Digwa maintained that he acted in self-defence after Nowak continued pursuing him, made racist remarks, and punched him. Prosecutors argued the evidence showed Digwa had lied. The jury convicted Digwa of murder on 28 May 2026. Digwa’s mother, Kiran Kaur, 53, was found guilty of assisting an offender. The judge rejected Digwa’s accusations that Nowak had physically or racially abused him. Digwa received a sentence of life imprisonment, with a minimum of 21 years. The police’s response to the crime, which was recorded by their body-worn cameras.) Before writing this piece, I forced myself to watch the video from the Police cameras that was released only today showing Henry Novak dying as he lay on the floor and cuffed by the police who refused to believe him, and as a matter of prejudice, preferred to believe the lies and accusations made by his murderer. It is hard to write dispassionately. However:- the tragedy of Henry Nowak raises a deeper question than guilt or innocence: We are challenged with facing the consequences of what happens when a society abandons Christian anthropology and replaces it with a secular doctrine of human perfectibility. “I can't breathe” became one of the defining moral slogans of our age. Yet in the death of Henry Novak the phrase returns with dreadful irony. A dying man lay handcuffed on the floor while those trusted with protecting the innocent were too brainwashed to recognise where the real danger lay. The shock of being told about the way or watching the video of how Henry Nowak died, stabbed to death by a Sikh who combined murder with character assassination, leaves us wanting to hold somebody accountable and to blame them. Obviously, his murderer is to blame. But that is not a sufficient solution because the police created such a gross injustice that we are shocked to our core at what this represents about what our society has become. And it is very tempting to blame the police. However difficult it is to control our sense of outrage and injustice in the timeworn phrase, they too are casualties of a sort, for they were trained – in fact brainwashed, in the art of the new secular moral idealism that has replaced Christian philosophy and ethics. So, our real enemy is not (just) the police, who committed this gross injustice because they were brainwashed by those who trained them, but rather the anti-Christian ethic that overcame Christian philosophy and culture. We may come to the conclusion that the tragic death of Henry Nowak, stabbed and misrepresented, handcuffed and injured, is the final outcome of this terrible philosophy of ethics: secular moral idealism. The Real Enemy The enemy we are struggling against needs to be given a name. That is not an easy process, but let us do what we can and identify it as secular moral idealism. Secular moral idealism is the belief that human beings are morally perfectible through education, legislation and social engineering. It seeks to abolish what we might call the universal human phenomenon of “fear of the other” because such fear offends against the humanist assumption that people can be educated into virtue and compelled by law to behave accordingly. Christianity takes exactly the opposite view, which is one reason secular moral idealism finds Christianity
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In the Image and Likeness of God. Those of us who hold to a Catholic understanding of the human person — seeing each life as sacred because it is made in the image of God — have, for decades now, found ourselves resisting a growing secular pressure to legalise euthanasia. The Arguments The arguments are by now familiar. On the one hand, we hear appeals to autonomy, freedom of choice, and the understandable desire to avoid suffering. On the other, there remains a deep moral conviction that life and death are not ours to dispose of at will — and that once the boundary is crossed, the consequences are neither contained nor benign. Experience bears this out. In Canada, there are now documented cases of disabled individuals being offered euthanasia because it is cheaper than providing basic support such as accessible housing. In the Netherlands, even teenagers suffering from depression have been granted euthanasia. What were once presented as tightly safeguarded exceptions have, in practice, expanded in ways that place the most vulnerable at risk. The argument, therefore, is no longer theoretical. It is grounded in real examples of systems in which safeguards have failed, and where the logic of euthanasia has begun to erode the dignity it was supposed to protect. Professor David Jones - In this conversation, I speak with Professor David Jones, Professor of Bioethics at St Mary’s University, London, and one of the central figures in the campaign against euthanasia in the United Kingdom.