A wedding under the Church of England’s watch

April 26, 2011 By

If you dare to wake up at 3 a.m. to watch the royal wedding on Friday, consider yourself a traitor. So argues Mark Oppenheimer at Slate, who encourages Americans to boycott the nuptials. This isn’t Mark’s usual religion column, but maybe you’ll enjoy the mini history lesson.

While I appreciate the informative way Oppenheimer makes his argument, I hope he won’t judge me if I openly admit that I plan to catch it on YouTube or some other website Friday evening.

(Cough: quick, shameless, self-promotion and then we can move on.) I argued in the Indianapolis Star today that the wedding represents a convergence of The King’s Speech and The Social Network as we see a mesh of tradition and tech. There’s something about the wedding that many long for: stability, honor, continuity and tradition, at least the romantic version of the monarchy.

So I won’t get up at 3 a.m., but I’m interested.

Yesterday, we discussed how the royal wedding could overshadow Pope John Paul II’s beatification because let’s be honest–media outlets have only so many reporters, photographers, air time, etc. But in the meantime, if we accept the fact that people will be searching for stories about it, we might as well learn something about how things work across the sea.

Along those lines (assuming we’re going to make the best out of the wedding coverage), this piece from Religion News Service shed some pretty interesting light on the church-state affairs in England.

As the Dean of Westminster, the Very Rev. John Hall, and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams prepare to conduct and solemnize the wedding of the century, both Christians and prominent and powerful nonbelievers are raising their voices and demanding the disestablishment the Church of England that has dominated religious life here for 400 years.

It’s a little premature to call the event “the wedding of the century,” but I like the angle on how the wedding raises issues about the Church of England’s role in state affairs.

In a powerful measure of Britain’s unique marriage of church and state, the parliament’s House of Lords contains 26 Lords Spiritual, all of them unelected men who also serve as bishops in the Church of England.

The assembled royals and bishops inside Westminster Abbey will reflect the close ties on both sides. Williams was appointed by Elizabeth in 2003–her fifth appointment to Canterbury in nearly 60 years–on the recommendation of former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

He, in turn, or his successor will one day crown the next monarch.

Mollie already looked at Kate Middleton’s recent confirmation, a further reflection of how the church impacts royalty.

Current Prime Minister David Cameron has expressed support “in principle” for scrapping the 1701 Law of Settlement restricting access to the throne by non-Catholics–a move Anglican leaders strongly oppose.

The 1701 law also forbids heirs to the throne from marrying Catholics, on the idea that their royal offspring who are raised as Catholics would be forced to choose between loyalty to Rome and loyalty to the Church of England.

…For his part, William has expressed little concern about or commitment to either the Church of England or Christianity. Those close to the couple say they are, like their peers, quietly indifferent about religion.

For all the speculation about the upcoming wedding, I’ve seen little coverage of the prince and his bride-to-be’s religious beliefs, so this part of the story was interesting. All of this led me to some coverage in the Telegraph about how the Church of England blocked a move to scrap a the law that prevents royal family members from marrying Roman Catholics. Apparently Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, began work towards the repeal but it was quietly shelved.

Church leaders expressed concern that if a future heir to the throne married a Roman Catholic, their children would be required by canon law to be brought up in that faith.

This would result in the constitutionally problematic situation whereby the Supreme Governor of the Church of England was a Roman Catholic, and so ultimately answerable to a separate sovereign leader, the Pope, and the Vatican.

There is no similar prohibition on the Royal family marrying members of other faiths such as Islam and Judaism, or those who are openly agnostic or atheist.

It’s difficult for Americans to imagine a church body dictating whether their leaders may marry outside of a particular faith tradition, but all of this is falls in a broader historical context. The law was passed to prevent the descendants of the Catholic James II from ascending the throne. As irrelevant as the monarchy might seem to Americans, stories like these help us understand how religion still plays an underlying role.

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Filed Under: Anglicanism, Catholicism, People, Religion, World
  • Julia

    It’s difficult for Americans to imagine a church body dictating whether their leaders may marry outside of a particular faith tradition, but all of this is falls in a broader historical context

    Actually, it’s not marrying outside of Anglicanism that is forbidden – it’s marrying a Catholic that is forbidden. An heir can marry a Muslim or a Jew and not lose his/her place in the line of succession.

    ultimately answerable to a separate sovereign leader, the Pope, and the Vatican.

    Unless a Catholic is a citizen of Vatican City, he or she does not answer to the Pope as a sovereign leader. Until sometime in the 1800s the Pope had been the sovereign of the central part of Italy for many centuries. It was very clear to everybody then that Catholics were not citizens of the Papal States unless they lived there. The Pope’s religious role is separate from his role as head of the Vatican City state.

  • Jerry

    Seeing the graphic made me wonder if there was a Dummies book about how to be a journalist. There is not, but there is “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Journalism”.

  • http://getreligion.org Terry

    I noticed that on Easter weekend, when the royal family by tradition muster to attend a service at Windsor, William and Kate those to have a quiet weekend together that did not include a church service. The future supreme governor of the Church of England could not even be bothered to go to church at Easter. Makes the establishment a bit of a mockery, doesn’t it?

  • http://getreligion.org Terry

    Apologies: should have posted: William and Kate chose to have a quiet weekend …

  • Matt

    Julia, you’re right. I think the problem would be partly addressed by replacing the word “sovereign” with “religious”, because the issue is the monarch’s religious role as head of the Church of England. However, it’s not just that, since there is no prohibition in law against the monarch being answerable to various non-Catholic religious leaders, though in practice every monarch since William and Mary has been a member of the Church of England.

    The main point to take away from Clegg’s recent effort is that it is impractical to amend the Act of Settlement without simultaneously making big changes in the larger issue of the Church’s establishment.

  • Matt

    …the Church of England that has dominated religious life here for 400 years.

    It’s been 500 years, not 400, since Henry VIII made himself Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Furthermore, it’s pretty safe to say that the Church of England (as a branch of the Catholic church) has dominated English religious life for a couple millenia.

  • Dave

    An heir to the throne can marry a Jew or a Moslem but not a Catholic because of history. “The past isn’t dead; it’s not even past.”

    BTW I believe the “[X] for Dummies” format is copyrighted.

  • magruder

    If the writer were an historian, she might bother to understand how this state of affairs arose, including English antipathy to foreign powers meddling in their affairs; papal refusal to give an annulment to Henry VIII (his request was hardly unique, and similar, even less justified annulments had been granted to other nobles in other lands); the tendency of Mary Tudor, a Catholic, to roast her Protestant heretics over slow fires at Smithfield; the continued naval harassment by Spain, a Catholic power; plots by Mary Stuart and others against the life of Elizabeth I; the Gunpowder Plot; etc. It has nothing to do with “religion” per se, and everything to do with political power struggles in England’s history.

  • Arnold

    magruder: you conveniently forgot the hundreds and thousands who were persecuted and murdered under Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and James I, not to mention the destruction and despoiliation of the monasteries and other Church properties for the benefit of Henry’s friends. It has been estimated that some 25,000 Catholics were driven into exile to flee the persecutions. That would be the equivalent of many hundreds of thousands today. Add to this the thousands of Catholics from the north of England killed by the monarchy for participating in the Pilgrimage of Grace. What Mary did was reprehensible and also destructive to her own cause. However, if you want to compare atrocities, I think the Anglican cause has far more to account for. It took a century of persecution to finally eradicate (almost that is, except for the recusants)the Catholic presence in England.