As Peter Hitchens reminds us, while emphasising that the foreign threat to our sovereignty today is not from there. One might add that there are many more than one.
Article XXXVII is entitled Of the Civil
Magistrates. In addition to much else, most of it truistic, almost at the
end it denies to the Pope any civil jurisdiction in England. He at least
arguably did not claim any then, and he certainly does not claim any now.
As a strong Unionist and English patriot, Hitchens is
doubtless aware that the Catholic Church is the single largest religious
organisation in Scotland, in Wales these days, in Northern Ireland, in the
North of England, and in the Midlands. She massively predominates in many areas of
each of those. In all of those areas apart from Wales and possibly the
Midlands, this has probably been true throughout living memory, and it has certainly been so
for many decades now.
I expect that the same is also true of London; if not,
then it would now be the black-led churches, the no-nonsense pastors of which are being courted as candidates both by Labour and by Respect. Perhaps, and without wishing to diminish the powerful philosophical case that she published the next day, that was one of the reasons why Sarah Teather voted to uphold traditional marriage. She had seen from where the challenge to her seat of Brent Central was going to come. I hope that such MPs will come in costume, and will do the full hand gestures, when they deliver exactly the speeches for which Parliament is crying out.
And Hitchens is also one of us who regrets
the partition of the United Kingdom in 1922. What does he imagine that a United Kingdom encompassing the whole of the Archipelago would have been like? Or might be like in the future?
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