The King's Religion

...The Irish government has already announced its intention of raising every question that involves such encroachments upon dominion independence...

...Not least is the fact that the Catholic duke of Norfolk, head of the English peerage, is hereditary earl marshal and ex officio has charge of all the coronation ceremonies...

...and the forthcoming imperial conference will have to consider and decide many problems which appear to involve an infringement upon that political sovereignty which all the dominions now claim as their admitted right...

...Baldwin's government...

...Their attitude as Catholics can scarcely be doubted, if and when Mr...

...It is not too much to say that, if the dominions show strong feeling on the subject—and there is every reason why they should— the coronation oath and the Act of Settlement of 1701 will have to be thrown overboard...

...But when her death, at a great age, confronted her then elderly son, King Edward VII, with the formalities of the coronation and the declaration of religious belief that had to be accepted by him, great changes had in fact taken place...

...It is no secret that the personal friendship of King Edward VII with the late duke was one of the chief reasons for abolishing the coronation declaration...

...THE KING'S RELIGION By DENIS GWYNN THE conversion of famous people to Catholicism has been so frequent and so marked a phenomenon in England during the past eighty years that it is often asked, with increasing curiosity, what would happen if either the king or his heirapparent should wish to become a Catholic...

...The fact that such matters were discussed seems to indicate clearly enough that the whole question of the king's succession has been under discussion...

...Now, one question which occurs at once in any reconsideration of the king's constitutional position is that by the Act of Settlement he is obliged to be a loyal Protestant and is warned that he will forfeit his crown if he should ever cease to be one...

...In face of such conditions it is considered by many people to be a most absurd anomaly that the king, who is nowadays directly sovereign of each of the dominions, should be obliged by an obsolete law to proclaim himself a loyal member of the Church of England...

...and it was largely with the King's personal assistance that the change was subsequently made, which relieved King George of having to make the same declaration when he ascended the throne...

...The total Catholic population is in fact larger than that of the Church of England and Presbyterians combined...

...The real question is whether he may enjoy the same freedom of conscience that is guaranteed to all his subjects, whether he should wish to be known as an agnostic or as a Catholic or anything else...

...A new situation has arisen through the rapid development of dominion independence throughout the British commonwealth since the war...

...Canada may be expected, as usual, to send a majority of Catholic delegates...

...Two years ago Cardinal Bourne himself indulged publicly in speculations concerning such a contingency...

...and the fact that he is also king of Britain does not give the British government any overriding authority in regard to the other states of the commonwealth, whose coequality is now formally proclaimed...

...and it is nowadays seldom that any government does not include some prominent Catholic figure...

...He knew what he wanted, and with his extraordinary intellectual power and political acumen he secured most of his demands...

...Scullin, who is known to be an uncompromising Catholic and is commonly described as "the Al Smith of Australia...

...Even in Great Britain the obsolete anti-Catholic statutes involve many anomalies...

...Those matters which were not then decided were left over for the next imperial conference, and in the meantime a committee of experts were to examine and prepare the ground...

...the rights and status of the governorsgeneral...

...And when the last imperial conference four years ago produced its epoch-marking report, it was agreed that the official title of the king should henceforth be changed...

...and in all such case or cases, the people of these realms shall be and are hereby absolved of their allegiance, and the said crown and government shall from time to time descend to and be enjoyed by such person or persons, being Protestant, as should have inherited and enjoyed the same, in case the said person or persons so reconciled, holding communion or professing or marrying as aforesaid, were naturally dead...

...But there is no immediate or even probable question of the king becoming a Catholic...

...If that issue is pressed with vigor by the Catholic delegates—as it ought to be and in all probability it will be—when this next imperial conference meets, then there can be little doubt that yet another revolutionary change in the British constitution will be effected without arousing any serious opposition...

...Quite recently the report of that preparatory conference of experts has been published...

...Australia will send the most junior Prime Minister in Mr...

...So Cardinal Bourne said nothing even surprising two years ago when he declared that if the king should become a Catholic and thereby forfeit his right to the throne, many Englishmen would voluntarily renew their allegiance to him—while the dominions would have very little sympathy with the obsolete statutes...

...In the last conference the late Kevin O'Higgins was by common consent a dominating personality...

...And in the two countries which have Protestant majorities and which are generally regarded as most conservative in imperial relations, Australia and New Zealand, it happens that both will be represented by Catholic Prime Ministers...

...the granting of credentials to diplomatic agents—have made it necessary to define much more clearly the status of the king in relation to each component part of the British commonwealth...

...How will the other dominions regard the matter...

...Only a few years ago the Catholic Lord Lovat was Secretary for the Dominions in Mr...

...It provides: "That all and every person or persons that is, are or shall be reconciled to, or shall hold communion with, the See or Church of Rome, or shall profess the Popish religion or shall marry a Papist, shall be excluded, and be forever incapable to inherit, possess or enjoy the crown and government of this realm and the dominions thereunto belonging, or any part of the same, or to have, use, or exercise, any regal power, authority, or jurisdiction within the same...

...Through Queen Victoria's long reign, the terms of that Act June ii, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 161 still represented more or less faithfully what the bulk of the people of England felt in regard to maintaining the dignity and the integrity of the Established Church...

...How much more is it out of sympathy with conditions in the various dominions of which the king is now the directly responsible sovereign...

...Instead of being, as formerly, king collectively of Great Britain and Ireland and of the dominions beyond the seas, His Majesty has now become, under the revised constitution of the British empire, king of each country separately...

...and to consider and remove such discrepancies is the immediate purpose of the imperial conference which is to meet this September...

...The conditions could scarcely be more favorable for a revision of the statutes...

...It was the English signatories to the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 who insisted most strongly upon the inclusion of the admirable provision which guarantees freedom of conscience to every citizen of the Irish Free State...

...the signing of treaties...

...And the position is made specially interesting because the Irish Free State has been more active than any other dominion in insisting upon the full implications of dominion status and upon the removal of all obsolete practices or anomalies...

...There is therefore no direct attack on Catholicism, as such, in the coronation oath...

...It was with intense reluctance that King Edward murmured in a deliberately inaudible tone the coronation declaration with its insults to the religion of his Catholic subjects...

...Among the questions concerning which it reached a preliminary agreement was that of the future succession to the throne—that any possible changes in regard to the succession must in future receive the consent of all the dominions instead of being a purely British affair...

...and this autumn the question will become a matter of practical politics when the Prime Ministers of all the self-governing dominions assemble in London for the imperial conference...

...Is it too much to expect that the coronation oath and the Act of Settlement will be candidly reviewed when the imperial conference meets in September...

...Still less can the Irish constitution, which in this respect is directly based upon the Anglo-Irish treaty, be harmonized with the Act of Settlement, which threatens the king with forfeiture of his throne if he is not a faithful Protestant...

...The Act of Settlement is less concerned to ensure that the king shall be a sincere believer in the Established Church of England, than that he shall on no account be a Catholic...

...Article 8 of the Irish constitution is based directly upon the treaty signed in Downing Street, and it provides that ¦"Freedom of conscience, with free profession and practice of religion . . . are guaranteed to every citizen, and no law can be made, either directly or indirectly, to endow any religion, to prohibit or restrict the free exercise thereof, or give any preference, or impose any disability on account of religious belief or religious status...

...Newfoundland, with a population half Catholic, will scarcely insist upon the Protestant succession being preserved...

...Cosgrave—himself one of the veterans of former conferences and enjoying the unique prestige of having been nearly ten years continuously in office—demands that the restrictions upon the king's liberty of conscience should be removed...

...He is advised directly by the ministers of each country on all affairs concerning it...

...New Zealand will send the senior member of the conference in the veteran Catholic statesman, Sir Joseph Ward, who will probably be the only survivor of prewar conferences...

...The coronation oath, however, in the form which emerged from that last change in 1910, still runs as follows: "I do solemnly and sincerely in the presence of God profess, testify and declare that I am a faithful Protestant, and that I will, according to the true intent of the enactments which secure the Protestant succession to the throne of my realm, uphold and maintain the said enactments to the best of my power according to law...

...The total Catholic population of the six dominions (Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand, South Africa and the Irish Free State) is more than 7,600,000 against less than 4,900,000 members of the Church of England and less than 2,500,000 Presbyterians, in the same countries...

...No amount of legal ingenuity could possibly reconcile that article of the Irish constitution with the coronation oath which compels the king to profess himself a faithful member of the Established Church, no matter what his private inclinations may be...

...A definite anomaly has arisen in the case of the Irish Free State, which guarantees freedom of conscience by its constitution yet has a king who is left unfree by an old law...

...Many of these questions—as, for instance, the right of appeal to the king in council...

...It happens also that in the most Catholic of the king's dominions this anomaly involves a direct violation of the constitution—and the avowed purpose of the next imperial conference is to remove all such anomalies...

...The statistics of religious denominations in the overseas dominions show a startling discrepancy between actual conditions and the statute book...

...but it still requires a profession of faith which even in Great Britain is nowadays no longer in accordance with the general ideas of His Majesty's subjects...