Queen and Gordon Brown Debate Ending Discrimination against Catholics, Ruth Gledhill, The Times, March 27, 2009

Queen and Gordon Brown Debate Ending Discrimination against Catholics

By Ruth Gledhill
The Times
March 27, 2009

http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2009/03/queen-and-gordon-brown-debate-ending-discrimination-against-catholics.html

Gordon Brown and Buckingham Palace have been in talks about ending the 300-year discrimination against Roman Catholics in Britain which still prevents an heir to throne from marrying a Catholic. See today's report by me and Francis Elliott and also the BBC reports it here.

Yesterday at a meeting of Catholic MPs and peers at the house, the Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor was eloquent on the anomaly of what Brown called 'state-sponsored sectarianism' in the modern era. 'I do feel it is discriminatory, no doubt about it. The heir to the throne can marry anyone he likes, a Jew, a Hottentot, a Muslim, and not a Roman Catholic.' Then he paused, and mused: 'I have two delightful nieces, thinking of whatever.....' Everyone laughed, including Lord Nicholas Windsor, at the meeting representing the Royal Family. He is the youngest child of the Duke and Duchess of Kent and forfeited his right of succession when he was received into the Catholic Church in 2001.

Incidentally, at the Catholic MPs' meeting yesterday, the Nuncio was present. Addressing the question of who will succeed Father Cormac, he said: 'Nobody knows.' I understand the Pope is likely to decide today, with an announcement next week or early in Holy Week. If the Pope decides to go for a 'safe pair of hands', it seems Arthur Roche of Leeds will be his choice. A number of sources are pointing in this direction, including some who were at a farewell dinner for the Cardinal in Westminster this week, from which the Archbishop of Birmingham was absent.

The LibDem MP Evan Harris is today at the Commons leading the debate of the second reading of his bill to end this discrimination. You can read a background paper on it here. But read on for why bishops in the Church of England are not happy. One has warned that this would in the end result in this: 'In time the governance of the UK would cease to be by 'the Crown in Parliament under God'.

In a BBC poll, more than eight of ten people said this discrimination should end, and also that women should have equal rights of succession as men.

But the established Church's fifth most senior bishop, Winchester's Michael Scott-Joynt, whose see is one of five with an automatic seat on the bench of bishops in the Lords, is not happy.

In a recent lecture, he said:

'Just now the most popular means of raising the question, of the relations of the Church of England with the Crown and with Parliament, seems to be the Act of Settlement of 1701 – whether on the apparently straightforward issue of its clear discrimination against Roman Catholics in the succession to the Throne, or as a proxy for any, some or all of Republicanism, Secularism, Scottish Independence or Disestablishment itself! Its repeal would have implications for the Acts of Union, and so for the Union itself between Scotland and England – so, I think, the engagement with the issue of the present First Minister of Scotland! And implications, too, much wider than generally admitted or perhaps even intended: could any legislation, that started from an anti-discrimination platform, restrict the heir to the throne from marrying an adherent of a non-Christian Faith, or the throne to communicant Christians, or indeed to believers of any kind? But is a British Monarchy conceivable that had no Christian reference or responsibility?

But to stay with the specific, and undeniable, question of the Act of Settlement’s discrimination against Roman Catholics (in early 18th century British eyes, and experience, the Taliban of their day). A Roman Catholic marriage would be likely to produce, a generation on, a Roman Catholic monarch who could not, as things are, formally recognise the Church of Scotland, or the Church of England, as Churches, or their clergy and bishops, or their sacraments, as true ministers and true sacraments; nor could the Archbishop of Canterbury crown such a monarch (until the re-union of the Western Church has been given to us) – still less a Muslim or any other person unable to 'join in Communion with the Church of England' (the requirement of the Act of Settlement). There would be a cutting of the mutual commitment of Church and Crown – and so in time the governance of the UK would cease to be by 'the Crown in Parliament under God'.

We can not know what may prove to be the effects, on all this, of the eventual Accession to the Throne of Charles III, in whatever political situation that takes place.

Of course – and as Archbishop Rowan put it a few weeks ago, unguardedly granted how journalists misrepresented his meaning - it would not be 'the end of the world' if somehow the Church of England was 'disestablished' ('somehow', because it is far from clear how it could be effected, let alone whether any Government is ever going to take the time to find out, let alone then to effect it!). Nor is it clear what disestablishment might mean, in what order and over what period. With the Archbishop, I should much regret any such development; and I should see it as a very much more significant loss to the State, than to the Church of England. For the latter, perhaps there would in time come to be some diminution of commitment to service of the community, to engagement with the politics and culture of the time, in the name of Jesus Christ, alongside worship and evangelism; there might be a growth in some parts of the Church of a kind of 'quietism'? For the State, there would be a loss on a grand scale, and over time, of resources for personal and communal living, and of influence upon the country’s values and on political decisions; but it would take a generation or so for this to be felt – and in many places and on many levels whatever 'Disestablishment' proved to mean might well not be acted upon!?

I am in no doubt that any significant level of 'Disestablishment' would weaken, rather than strengthen, the effective witness in this society of the other Christian Churches – and indeed of the other Faiths; because in present circumstances any such move would be a triumph above all for those who are pushing for the Secularisation of politics and public life in the UK (did you know, by the way, that the British Humanist Association has around 5,000 members, and the National Secular Society about 3,000?).'

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(Note: special blessings to Sarah Johnson, commenting on the Cardinal's view that the heir to the throne can marry a Jew, Hottentot or Muslim but not a Catholic: 'But will probably marry a hotty totty!')