Is the PM Catholic?

When Protestants or the next best thing, atheists, begin to mull over the obscure points of the Catholic canon law, you know time is out of joint.

What piques such interest among our literati is Boris Johnson’s recent wedding officiated – though, as far as I know, not consummated – in Westminster Cathedral, the seat of British Roman Catholicism.

Considering Mr Johnson’s chequered amorous past, which included two prior marriages and an unspecified number of illegitimate children, people who until now have evinced no interest in Catholicism are expressing deep concern masking an even deeper indifference (sort of like Western leaders, after each new crime committed by Putin or Lukashenko).

Partly it’s Johnson’s own fault, for his religious past is quite diversified too. He was baptised as Catholic, confirmed as Anglican and has since studiously neglected the prescriptions of either denomination.

It’s such polyvalence that has made so many hacks dip into the arcane depths of Catholic statutes. The consensus is that, since Johnson’s previous marriages were outside the Church, they may be deemed invalid. If he now professes Catholicism, he is thus allowed to tie the knot the Roman way.

There’s the rub though. For, in addition to being a deliriously happy bridegroom, Johnson also happens to be Her Majesty’s prime minister. If he is indeed a professing Catholic, then certain issues arise that touch upon constitutional, not just merely canon, law.

For, since Tudor times, England has been a Protestant commonwealth constitutionally, politically and geopolitically. Anglicanism is the state religion, and, taking her coronation oath in 1953, the Queen replied in the affirmative to the question “Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law?” (I think that this confluence of church and state is incongruous to both, but no one asked me.)

Whereas other mainstream Protestant denominations are nowadays accepted as unthreatening, Roman Catholicism is a different matter altogether. Ever since Henry VIII defied the pope, supposedly in his quest for a male heir, the confessional issue has been intertwined with the little matter of national sovereignty.

England’s relations with the great Catholic powers, France and Spain, weren’t always cordial. Hence Henry, and many others after him, feared that French and Spanish kings could use the pope as a conduit of their political power in Britain. In that context, Catholics got to be seen not just as infidels but as traitors, a sort of papist fifth column.

I wish both sides had been less intransigent in that dispute, with England remaining Catholic without compromising her sovereignty. But she didn’t, and anti-Catholic sentiments were kept hot for centuries by some invisible Bunsen burner.

Until the 1829 Roman Catholic Relief Act, Catholics hadn’t even been allowed to sit in parliament. While that restriction was removed, others have remained in place.

For example, a Catholic still can’t ascend to the throne, and, more germane to the situation in hand, a Catholic prime minister isn’t allowed to appoint Archbishops of Canterbury, which is his remit. Actually, it’s the monarch who appoints and the PM who merely advises, but that’s strictly pro forma.

One way or another, Mr Johnson is our first Catholic prime minister ever, if he’s indeed a Catholic. By his own admission he doesn’t practise any religion with much piety, but his formal allegiance still may create something of a conundrum. However, I’m sure this technical issue will be settled without a hitch, no problem there.

The real problem is different. For, apart from a few hacks, constitutional scholars and students of the Catholic canon law, no one really cares. Just a couple of generations ago, to say nothing of a couple of centuries, there would have been mass protests not just in the press, but also in the streets.

People in workman’s clothes would have marched in the streets chanting anti-Catholic slogans. Words like ‘papist spies’ and ‘popish traitors’ would have been on everyone’s lips, and Catholics with little taste for martyrdom would have cowered behind closed doors.

I know this sounds odd coming from a Catholic, but I’d prefer such a public outcry to what’s happening now: shoulder-shrugging indifference.

No one really cares whether our PM is an Anglican, Catholic, animist or atheist. Yes, some people like to toy with obscure points of religious and constitutional law, but this preoccupation with form can’t mask uninterest in, and ignorance of, content.

The ignorance cuts deep, all the way down to Ben Macintyre, the Times columnist whose scholarly appearance belies his learning difficulties. I last wrote about him a few years ago, when he extolled the poetic excellence of rap and agitated for Bob Dylan to get the Nobel Prize for literature.

According to Macintyre, “…Dylan is indisputably one of the greatest lyrical poets of the age, a supreme master of language who has reinvented his art with exemplary energy and imagination for more than half a century.”

Having thus established his Van Gogh ear for poetry, Macintyre has now made this comment on Johnson’s religiosity: “He has often voiced equivocal feelings about monotheism, pointing to a mixed ancestry that is Jewish and Muslim as well as Christian.”

Hence this eminent historian and award-winning columnist doesn’t know that Judaism and Islam are monotheistic religions too. He seems to think that the term denotes single-minded commitment to one confession only, and one would think he ought to have been disabused of that misapprehension in primary school. Oh well, hey-ho.

No one notices, no one cares, Britain is in the throes of somewhat oxymoronic fervent apathy. If Boris Johnson declared his commitment to the Black Mass involving human sacrifice, perhaps some sticklers would object. Otherwise, the foxholes remain the only places where atheists can’t be found.

Or perhaps even atheists would be better than what we have now. At least they believe in something, if not God. Today’s predominant state of mind is spiritual lethargy, pandemic materialism, believing in nothing but self and usually with a steadily diminishing justification.

I just hope Johnson’s next wife won’t be Muslim. I’m not sure Britain is as ready for a Muslim prime minister as London is for a Muslim mayor.