Solidarity Editorial:
When King Charles The Second was dying in 1685, after 25 years on the throne, Catholic priests were smuggled in to accept him into the Church and give him the comfort of the last rites of the “one true Holy and Apostolic religion”. Both Charles and the priests believed that he was, so to speak, having his passport put in order to ensure, after he died, a quick and smooth journey to Paradise.
Charles lived in a comparatively simple intellectual and emotional world. The age of scepticism, which succeeded the long Protestant-Catholic religious wars in Europe, was dawning, but for Charles - unlike Tony Blair today - his beliefs did not fly starkly in the face of what was then known about the world and the universe.
Blair’s “end of rule” conversion to Catholicism resembles more than a little that of King Charles. Opportunist and self-serving as always, Blair has waited to convert formally to the Catholic Church until he is no longer in a job where pragmatic electoral consideration and decision would put him at odds with the Church.
For instance, one of the Church’s leaders, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, recently pronounced that Catholic MPs should vote as their spiritual leaders tell them to on abortion rights.
Yet there is a serious issue embedded in this tale of a modern politician. A law dating from 1700 still prohibits the monarch from being, or marrying, a Catholic. It does not actually prohibit a Catholic from being prime minister, though Catholics are barred from advising the king or queen in their role as head of the Church of England, and so some special administrative arrangement would have to be made were a Catholic prime minister. No Catholic has ever been prime minister.
It is wrong that Catholics, or supporters of any other religion, should be second-class citizens in such things, or think it wiser to accept conventional limitations, as Blair did.
The truth is that Blair’s beliefs through his ten years in power were those of a Catholic. There are real problems about having someone with beliefs that require or might require of a Tony Blair (or a Ruth Kelly, an associate of the right-wing Catholic cult Opus Dei) that they obey Catholic Church discipline and impose Catholic dogmas on those who reject them. Such cases should be taken up as they arise.
But the only principled attitude here is that all citizens, people of various religions or of none, should have equal rights. None should be penalised for their religious beliefs so long as they remain a private matter. There should be strict separation of Church and State — in schooling and elsewhere.
One of the things that Blair did as prime minister that will have long-term consequences was to entrench and spread “faith schools”, and not only Catholic ones. 36% of state primary schools, and 18% of state secondary schools, are now (as of 2005) “faith schools”.
Blair should have been free in office to be of any religion — and, on the same principle, the basic laws of a democratic state should prohibit all state subsidies of religion, as in the schools.
