Settled

Tracey Rowland's article is well worth reprinting in full:

Last summer Stuart Reid invited me to lunch at Rules to discuss US Catholic Whiggery and other contemporary problems. We agreed that the Iraq campaign has been a disaster, that economic rationalism and social conservatism are enemies not allies, and that Margaret Thatcher was a Whig not a Tory. In short, we were of one mind on most subjects, except the Act of Settlement.

Reid argued that on a day-to-day basis the Act of Settlement has no discriminatory effect on Catholics unless they happen to be in love with members of the royal family, and that if the Act of Settlement is amended the UK will become in law, as well as in fact, a secular state. He quotes Newman to the effect that Anglicanism is at least a serviceable breakwater against errors more fundamental than its own.

I agreed with Reid that Catholics do not normally wake up feeling oppressed because William is prohibited from marrying one of their nieces. So long as we are not paying higher taxes for the privilege of attending Mass or being excluded from the universities or forced to meet secretly in some local worthy's barn, then we can cope with this discriminatory clause. It has no practical effect on 99.999 per cent of Catholics in their daily life.

However, my own concern is that unless the younger members of the British royal family start to marry people who are, regardless of denominational allegiance, genuinely Christian, then the monarchy itself is in danger of imploding.

Monarchy is by its nature a sacral institution. There have been pagan, Jewish, Islamic, Shinto, Buddhist, Confucian and Christian kings and emperors. However, there has never been a monarchy dedicated to the promotion of secularism or godless do-goodery. The Narnia chronicles attest to this. Aslan, clearly the dearest and the best, is literally "layed upon the altar" in an act of self-sacrificial love and surrender for his subjects. He dies for them. He doesn't organise a pop concert to raise money for a fashionable charity. Bearing the stress of a sacred duty to defend a Christian cultural order is the specific difference between being a royal and being a common celebrity.

Since the Anglican Church is itself in decline and the pristine English rose an endangered species, the future of the monarchy itself requires that we extend the pool of future royals to include good Catholic girls. More than anything else Britain and the countries of the Commonwealth need a future queen who is heroically Christian. A Catholic girl might have the panache to be an attractive sign of contradiction to contemporary trash culture.

Further, good Catholic girls don't go to psychotherapists, astrologers, crystal-gazers and lifestyle-trainers. They go to Mass, say their prayers and mobilise their friends to make novenas. A rich sacramental life would seem to be the most necessary attribute in any future royal consort.

When I look at the possible catchment areas there are the Benelux royals and closer to home Fr Alexander Sherbrooke's youth group at St Patrick's, Soho. Maybe the younger royals would actually enjoy helping with the soup-runs at St Patrick's or St James's, Spanish Place, and might just find that time spent in a glowing candlelit church for a few moments of peace and silence with other young people in an atmosphere of friendship was something worth experiencing. The presence of some really beautiful, articulate, amusing and devout young women might at least broaden their social horizons.

Another of Reid's concerns is that there is something rather infra dig about having Catholics queue up behind a long line of groups claiming discrimination. We should be quietly confident of our pedigree. We know that Oxford and Cambridge were built by Catholics and that Eton was Catholic before it was Protestant. We know that things went pear-shaped because one English king lost his moral compass and decided to have his friends executed when they wouldn't publicly support his remarriage. We know all about the rows of Victoria Crosses that line the dining hall of Stonyhurst. We have no need to feel insecure.

And ask yourself this: why is Dr Evan Harris, the aggressively secular and pro-abortion Lib Dem MP, suddenly being so nice to us when he is otherwise opposed to the whole Christian view of human beings and their place in nature and the world?

There are, besides, alternative historical scenarios, however. If a young prince was to fall in love with a good Catholic girl the "Romeo and Juliet" narrative would be so overwhelming a temptation for the press to run that it is likely that an amendment to the Act of Settlement would quickly follow upon popular acclaim.

In the final analysis this might be the best of all possible narratives to bring some closure to the trauma of the 16th century. The anti-Catholic clause in this revolutionary piece of legislation had its origins in the boorish treatment of Catherine of Aragon by Henry VIII.

Perhaps such a wound in the English psyche needs to be healed by an act of love rather than another act of what might seem to some to be political violence?

If either William or Harry were to find themselves a princess with the heart of a Narnian Lucy type, my hunch is that the Anglicans would accept her, even if she went to Mass, because they would be so relieved that she was at least genuinely Christian.

Perhaps someone could start a confraternity under the patronage of Lady Margaret Beaufort or Lady Margaret More-Roper or St Margaret Clitherow to pray for this kind of solution? Perhaps the holy nuns at Tyburn could make this their Lenten project?

In the final analysis, I have become a convert to the Reid position. Let's not tie ourselves to the bandwagons of Dr Harris and the secularist Right's industry [what a providential typo]. Let's keep our dignity and pray to God through the intercession of all those holy confessors, bishops, kings, monks, hermits and virgins who once made Britain an island of saints, and above all through the intercession of Our Lady of Eton, that the evil done by one Henry might be undone by another royal, even another Henry, in an act of love, with the popular support of his subjects, without recourse to the dubious rhetoric of rights.