When in Britain, do as Rome would have you do

BRITAIN’S secularist-in-chief, Terry Sanderson, says there’s something very distasteful about the fact that one of the country’s superstitionists-in-chief is trying to coerce British politicians to vote according to the dictates of his masters in Italy instead of their own consciences and for their own constituents.

The leader of Catholics in England and Wales, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, has brought together more than 70 Catholic MPs to pressure them to vote against the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which would allow potentially useful work to be carried out to combat killer diseases such as motor neurone, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

In this weekend’s e-zine, Newsline, the National Secular Society, of which Sanderson is president, says,

Terry Sanderson . . . sent this letter to The Times (unpublished at the time of writing): “Although everyone in a democracy has a right to take part in the debate, to lobby and campaign about political decisions, there is something very distasteful and worrying about the Catholic Church’s tactics.

“In some instances – such as in the last US election – the Church threatened politicians with withdrawal of communion if they did not support the banning of abortion. This is a particularly insidious kind of pressure, and raises suspicions that some MPs are not voting in line with the wishes of their constituents, or even with their own conscience, but on the orders of the Vatican.

“There have been several recent surveys that showed the Catholic Church to be out of step with public opinion on issues of personal morality, such as abortion, contraception, adoption, euthanasia, homosexuality and stem cell research. There is nothing wrong with them being out of step, but there is everything wrong with applying a very powerful emotional thumbscrew to our elected representatives in order to get their way.”

Sanderson ends with a warning: “The Cardinal should tread carefully with the style of his lobbying. It risks raising hostility against his Church from those who see his activities as less than democratic.”

Well bring on the hostility. Why not?

There’s a history of what many would claim is justified intolerance against people who open the door for an outside power to govern their own country. It goes back a long way. John Locke’s 1689 A Letter Concerning Toleration singled out such people. We see it now with Muslims, who want to please some nonexistent sky fairy. Closer to Earth than the sky fairy is the Pope, whom Catholic MPs are being asked to obey rather than do as they are paid by us all to do: to look at matters as they affect their country and the people they represent.

Locke wrote that the custodians of the law, the magistrates, should not tolerate a church that was constituted in such a way

that all those who enter into it do thereby, ipso facto, deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince. For by this means the magistrate would give way to the settling of a foreign jurisdiction in his own country, and suffer his own people to be listed, as it were, for soldiers against his own government.

It was Catholics whom Locke had in mind then. Although he seemed like a genial sort of chap who generally pleaded for religious tolerance, he drew an exception here.

And isn’t that what the Vatican would have our politicians do – the very thing that Locke feared? Isn’t that why Murphy-O’Connor is trying to coerce them? Isn’t that why the Catholic Church threatened candidates in the last US election with excommunication – or at least the withdrawal of communion – if they didn’t toe the Catholic Church’s line?

It’s one thing giving churches and other organisations the freedom to say what they wish and to lobby and get as much of the ear of government as they can by reasonable means. It’s quite another to hand them the power to “call together”, as Newsline puts it, 70-odd decision makers, members of one of the legislative chambers of the nation, for a good talking-to. Perhaps we can’t blame the Catholic Church for trying it on, but we can blame gullible and superstitious MPs for allowing themselves to be summoned in this way.