LOYALTY

A Roman Catholic writing from Scotland to the Spectator (16 June 2007) revealed perhaps more than he should when he wrote:

After professing the Nicene Creed those being received into the Roman Catholic Church state publicly ‘I believe and profess all that the Holy Catholic Church believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God'.

To be fully informed in the matter one should first read the Nicene Creed, if it is not already known, a Creed which was formulated under the direction of Archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria and the Coptic Church.

Leaving that aside this is an abdication from independent thought and rational process. It is total subordination to the will of one man, albeit one who claims to be God's vicar on earth; a claim which one may take with salt to taste.

It follows that if it is intimated from the pulpit on Sunday that the Common Market/EEC /EU is a good thing, ergo it is a good thing and never mind the facts. If it was intimated in Italy that to vote Christian Democrat was a good thing, it was a good thing and never mind that they were up to the eyeballs in corruption. If it is declared that abortion is in all circumstances evil, so it is and never mind the consequences. If Catholic Archbishops in Scotland, England and Wales demand that Catholic MPs must vote against abortion measures, that is what they must do, otherwise they risk their communion with the Catholic Church which is their only passport to Heaven.

This is not a new problem. It goes back for centuries. It was the blood question at the time of the Reformation. Where does the loyalty of a Catholic lie in the event of conflict? To the Crown of England or to the Pope of Rome? For a century and a half it was feared that it was to Rome and with good reason.

For his own personal reasons but also for reasons of state King Henry VIII repudiated the authority of the Pope in both the spiritual and temporal spheres. He would not accept that he was not master in his own house.

The great Catholic powers, Austria France and Spain, dared not take on Henry but when he died leaving a relatively unstable situation with a boy king steeped in Protestantism on the throne they took heart. The Spanish Embassy became a hot bed of intrigue and when the boy King died at a tender age it took nine days to oust his nominated Protestant successor, Lady Jane Grey, and install the fiercely Catholic Bloody Mary in her stead.

In the long run that might have been their undoing. In little more than three years Bloody Mary burned alive almost 300 'heretics', from little children to King Henry's Archbishop Cranmer. It was a reign of terror. She was unmourned when she died.

Her successor, Queen Elizabeth I, as a woman and a Protestant, was fair game for the Catholic Powers. As it did not recognise King Henry's divorce from Catharine of Aragon the Vatican declared that Elizabeth, daughter of Ann Boleyn. was illegitimate and therefore not qualified to take the throne. Her subjects were released from their allegiance and license was granted to assassinate her for reward in this life and absolution for the next. Sabres were rattled everywhere culminating in the great enterprise of the Armada.

Queen Elizabeth proved to be a worthy daughter of her father King Henry and gave a good account of herself in which she was greatly helped by the fact that her people had no desire to see the reign of Mary repeated.

All this time the loyalty of Catholics was to say the least questionable. Jesuits who were barred from England and whose oath of loyalty commits them to the most dastardly of crimes to order from above, were nevertheless inserted across the beaches and concealed by Catholics in priest holes constructed in their houses.

The century which followed the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603 was dominated by the Catholic question and the determination of the Vatican to regain the control repudiated by King Henry. They failed for the time being with the flight of King James II and the installation of William of Orange and his wife Mary.

The quest has never been abandoned. It was a sub plot in Hitler's attempt to outdo Napoleon by conquering both Europe and Russia. It is very much alive today in the European project to recreate the Holy Roman Empire with England embedded in it. The benign face in Britain of Roman Catholic clergy hides the old enmity towards an independent Britain divorced from Vatican control .It was the new Pope Benedict XVI who, as Cardinal Ratzinger and head of the Vatican department which used to be called the Inquisition, described the Church of England as a non Church with no validity, whereas in fact it is several centuries older than his own and has closer links to the origins of Christianity.

All this history points to the good sense of the legislators who in 1688/9 barred all Catholics from public office and from proximity to the crown. To ban them from having churches may seem extreme but they had been subjected to extreme provocation and churches were seen then, as mosques should be today, as centres of subversion.

Since Waterloo and right up to the present day there has been a progressive relaxation of measures discriminating against Catholics which was matched by a lack of conflict except in Ireland, where it was easy to keep old enmities alive . It could be seen as a mistaken lowering of the guard. Not so long ago a Times columnist, Mary Ann Sieghart, who has since, it was reported without fanfare, converted to Church of England, remarked that a Catholic Establishment had quietly taken over and nobody had noticed.

It ought not to matter whether a person is Church of England or Roman Catholic. It does matter however because the Roman Catholic church must dominate. It is aggressive and ruthless. Every Catholic is a soldier in the struggle and every Catholic is obedient to the Pope. For a British Prime Minister to be a Catholic is unacceptable. For the Monarch more so. It is unacceptable that persons elected to represent the interest of the public (as they hope and suppose) should be obliged to take instructions from such as the Pope.

For the British people to be subordinate in a Catholic State cannot be allowed to continue. It is all a question of loyalty.