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We had this discussion in English History about a year ago and my teacher brought up a good question. After Bloody Mary the English pretty much swore off anything but a protestant monarch. But does that really matter anymore? What role does the Defender of the Faith have today really with normal people? If the next King turned out to be Catholic would anyone care?

edited for lame memory

Well there's the theory and the reality.

The theory is, a non-Church of England monarch is utterly unacceptable. To the extent that my dad thinks that Diana was assassinated on the orders of the Queen, simply because she was going to marry Dodi - a Muslim. He thinks that the future King's mother being a Muslim was so unacceptable that murder was a good alternative.

Truthfully, it would be a scandal if we turfed up with a Catholic King or Queen. I mean, the monarch is the head of the religion. How can you have a Catholic head of the Church of England? It makes no sense. You might as well ask if anybody would care if there was a Republican head of the Democratic party.

There's also the small matter that it's actually illegal for any monarch to be Catholic, or be married to a catholic.

That said, to the average guy in the street, it probably wouldn't matter too much. I certainly wouldn't give much of a damn.

That's what I thought, but - not being English - I wasn't positive. To me, the question sounded a bit like, "Could a Buddhist be elected to the papacy?"

Well, there were plenty non-christian popes in the sense that they didn't really hold high their values of protecting the poor, celibacy, etc.

especially the medici popes but i think that altough britain is predominantly secular , certain ariscratic traditions linger

shran wrote:Well, there were plenty non-christian popes in the sense that they didn't really hold high their values of protecting the poor, celibacy, etc.

Indeed. However, all the popes were members of the clergy of the Catholic Church.

Monroe wrote:After Bloody Mary the English pretty much swore off anything but a protestant monarch.

Nitpick - it wasn't until James II that we binned Catholic monarchs, and even that didn't become law for over a decade.

Huh.......I had no idea the English Monarch had anything to do with the church. Learn something new every day.

Mark wrote:Huh.......I had no idea the English Monarch had anything to do with the church. Learn something new every day.

The whole reason for being of the Anglican Church (and therefore the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians) is that Henry VIII wanted a divorce and the Pope wouldn't give him one. Henry said, "Screw you, Pope!" and invented a church that would give him his divorce - the Anglican Church. IIRC, Henry wasn't the head of the church, but he dictated its canon.

I can't imagine the Pope was too happy with that.

He wasn't, especially as he'd not long before awarded Henry the title "Defender of the Faith" for writing a detailed paper ripping Martin Luther's theories apart.

Captain Seafort wrote:He wasn't, especially as he'd not long before awarded Henry the title "Defender of the Faith" for writing a detailed paper ripping Martin Luther's theories apart.

Damn that's the title not protector of the church. Blah. Its hasn't been -that- long since I took English history. Why am I forgetting all this stuff? Grr!

And Henry was the head of the Church. I forget, of course, the name of the act that passed but it was like the third or forth one he passed to put himself as the Church's leader.