Settle This

I know of only one argument against the Act of Settlement, namely that anywhere with which we share a Head of State might break that connection unless it were repealed. If so, then where, exactly?

We Catholics certainly do not need to be played by the likes of Dr Evan Harris MP, whom the Church of England permits to sit on the Oxford Diocesan Board of Social Responsibility while he is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Vice–President of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association.

The Act of Settlement postdates the Establishment of the Church of England by a century and a half, and is wholly unconnected to it. Its repeal would in no sense revive any Stuart claim to the Throne, for myriad reasons, not least including that Parliament has always had the right to determine the succession thereto. Even James II, while he may have attempted to re-Catholicise the government of the Three Kingdoms, made no attempt to re-Catholicise the Church of England, and would probably have done better if he had, so hopeless was and is that cause. All in all, Dr Harris's Bill is based on historical illiteracy.

But, of course, neither Jacobitism nor Catholicism is any part of his agenda. He and his want to repeal the Act of Settlement because the idea that it is integral to ecclesiastical Establishment is so fixed in the minds of the very expensively half-educated commentariat.

They want to move on to their real aim, which is the repudiation of Christianity as the basis of the British State, whether by disestablishment in England, by disestablishment in Scotland, by the abolition of Christian RE and collective worship in the state schools of Wales, by the banishment of the historic Protestant churches (and then also of the Catholic Church) from the state schools of Northern Ireland, by the removal of chaplaincies to and prayers in national bodies such as the Armed Forces and Parliament, or by numerous other means.

Catholics must be the first to say, "Not In Our Name".