Limits to Unity & the Monarchy

Dear Stan,

As a follow up to the pro-abortion "Catholic" politician row, here is a link to an article in the ever-excellent Touchstone magazine with reveals the chaotic and divided attitudes to abortion within US Christian churches. Yet again it highlights the vacuity of so much well meaning waffle on the importance of "Christian unity". If we cannot get agreement even on this issue, what on earth can "Christians" agree on?

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=22-02-039-c

The old saying "Divide and conquer" springs to mind.

I am also reminded of an article in "Faith" magazine years ago. It looked back to a very different Britain in late 1949 when there had been a lengthy exchange of letters in "The Times" on the subject of Church reunion. In one letter a Catholic bishop had courteously but firmly explained why Catholics and Anglicans could not logically say the Lord's prayer together. They would attach different meanings even to phrases such as "Thy Kingdom come". In this phrase a Catholic would be praying for the world wide establishment of the Catholic church, while the Anglican standing beside him in Christian fellowship would be praying for...er, something else, probably vague in the best Anglican tradition. Such a straight forward and clear thinking recognition of the real problems is absent in the ecumenical droning from modern pulpits.

This basic confusion and reluctance to face bedrock principles is evident this week, with the debate in Parliament on a Private Members Bill to remove one of the few remaining legal pieces of "discrimination" against Catholics. The heir to the throne cannot marry a Catholic without losing the right to secede to the throne. (This became a very faint possibility in the 1970s when Prince Charles' name was paired with Princess Astrid of Luxemburg, who is Catholic. Nothing came of it and she married someone else). But the "discrimination" against Catholics was ignorantly denounced as if it was the equivalent of racial discrimination. After all, no law explicitly forbids the heir from marrying a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu or an atheist on pain of disinheritance.

Yet a fundamental issue of principle still exists and cannot be wished away on the basis of modern whims about "injustice" or "discrimination". Hardly anyone admits that there can be just discrimination. Admittedly British Airways can still discriminate against blind pilots and our hospitals are not forced to accept the mentally disabled as brain surgeons - well, not yet. But only one or two people pointed out one blindingly obvious fact. What if the heir Prince William marries a Catholic and they bring up their children as Catholics, as the Church has always demanded? The monarch after next will be a Catholic head of an Anglican church.

Fortunately the Bill has failed. But the fact that it could even be introduced and waste Parliamentary time and media space speaks volumes about the shallowness of understanding in this country of basic principles of religion and morality.

It is another aspect of the problem I described in an earlier blog. Just about everyone denounces pedophiles as viler than the vilest of the vile, Beasts, Monsters, hanging's too good for them..... But hardly anyone has a coherent understanding of WHY it is wrong and why our enthusiasm for total sexual liberation for adults leads inevitably to the sexual abuse of children.