Pope's Visit: Moral Absolutes and Crumbling Empires

Rebellion against the pope was the foundational act of English power yet now the pope stands in Westminster Hall


From The Guardian

By Andrew Brown

This was the end of the British Empire. In all the four centuries from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, England has been defined as a Protestant nation. The Catholics were the Other; sometimes violent terrorists and rebels, sometimes merely dirty immigrants. The sense that this was a nation specially blessed by God arose from a deeply anti-Catholic reading of the Bible. Yet it was central to English self-understanding when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1952, and swore to uphold the Protestant religion by law established.

For all of those 400 or so years it would have been unthinkable that a pope should stand in Westminster Hall and praise Sir Thomas More, who died to defend the pope's sovereignty against the king's. Rebellion against the pope was the foundational act of English power. And now the power is gone, and perhaps the rebellion has gone, too. Perhaps, though, it has not. First there was Rowan Williams, making the point that when the Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops of England mingled in Lambeth Palace, all alike were bishops. This the pope, of course, denies. Then there is our stubborn attachment to the notion that all you really need is decency, rather than theology. This, too, the pope denies, and the section of his speech dealing with that was the most interesting part. "If moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident – herein lies the real challenge for democracy."

This is a deeply conservative and pessimistic view of human nature. He praised our "pluralist democracy which places great value on freedom of speech, freedom of political affiliation and respect for the rule of law, with a strong sense of the individual's rights and duties, and of the equality of all citizens before the law."

Indeed, he thinks that this is more or less what Catholic doctrine points towards. But he does not think it is or can be stable without an explicit and worked out moral and ethical dimension based on absolute principles – for him, obviously, Catholic Christianity. Social, scientific, and economic change all bring new moral challenges.

These worries are not unique to Catholics. The philosopher Mary Warnock whose work on bioethics shaped modern British law on such subjects as embryo experimentation, to the horror of Catholic bioethicists, approaches them from the other side in her new book Dishonest to God.

But in Benedict's view, these cannot be met simply by the consensus of the great and good, as modern British society tends to do.

This is not an invitation to theocracy: "The role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms ... but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principle".

But the claim that there are objective moral principles is itself controversial. The clash of such principles or their reduction into common sense, was what British society thought it had outgrown. Perhaps that, too, was an illusion of empire.