It began with a papal address in Rome and ended with a whimper in Westminster – when an attempt to change the law on equality as it affects religious organisations was abandoned. In between was a row that explains much about the place of Catholicism in contemporary Britain
Most weeks should find at least one country’s bishops in Rome on their five-yearly ad limina visit. The highlight of their stay is their joint audience with the Pope and the exchange of formal greetings.
These meetings are rarely reported outside the religious media, but when Pope Benedict addressed the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales on Monday, a furious response from secularists and gay groups was unleashed and his remarks made front-page news. The Pope had complained in trenchant terms to the bishops about “unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance to their beliefs”. This was widely seen as a comment on the Equality Bill currently going through Parliament.
It was reported as an “unprecedented” attack by one head of state on the affairs of another sovereign state, with the Pope portrayed as wading into party politics. But that interpretation alone does not explain the ferocity of some of the criticism.
Both the National Secular Society and the gay pressure group Stonewall have begun to mobilise support for protests when the Pope visits Britain later this year. Their reaction and that of the secular media to the Pope’s address tells us a great deal about the standing of the Catholic Church in Britain, the evolution of the Government’s equality agenda, current attitudes to lesbian and gay rights and relations between Church and State.
When he addressed the bishops, Pope Benedict was responding to matters highlighted by the bishops themselves in their diocesan reports. These reflected on the secularising trend in British society and attempts by the Government to constrain the Church’s activities in the name of equality and fairness. Chief among these in recent years were the failed attempt to force religious schools to accept a quota of pupils from non-faith backgrounds in 2006 and Parliament’s approval of the Sexual Orientation Regulations (SORS) three years ago which obliged adoption agencies to consider same-sex couples as potential adopters. As a consequence, most Catholic children’s societies either severed their formal relationship with the Church or discontinued their adoption work. Also in the course of their tour of dicasteries, bishops made officials aware of their current battle with the Government over the Equality Bill. There can be no doubt that the Pope’s speech reflected concern in the Curia about the Equality Bill as part of a general trend in Britain towards curtailing religious freedom.
Advisers to the bishops’ conference identified problems with the Equality Bill at an early stage. They saw it as loosening the exemption in 2003’s Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations, granted to religious organisations and entitling them to exclude individuals from certain posts on the grounds of sexual orientation. The exemption was inserted “so as to avoid conflicting with the strongly held religious convictions of a significant number of the religion’s followers”. According to the National Secular Society, which sent a complaint to the European Commission’s Equal Opportunities Commissioner, it licensed discrimination by organised religion on the grounds of sexual orientation.
The Government had also heard reports that religious groups were using the exemption to exclude people from “non-religious” jobs such as finance directors and cleaners. It introduced an amendment to the Equality Bill stating that individuals could be excluded on the grounds of sexual orientation when “the employment wholly or mainly involves (a) leading or assisting in the observation of liturgical or ritualistic practices of the religion, or (b) promoting or explaining the doctrine of the religion (whether to followers of the religion or to others).”
The Churches insisted this new wording significantly narrowed the scope of the exemption. Peers agreed last week when they voted down the amendment.
Legal advisers to the Catholic bishops indicated that the amendment left them open to legal challenge. In a series of meetings, representatives of the bishops’ conference tried to persuade the Government’s equality office to leave the law as it stood. They argued that religious freedom needed to be enshrined in law so that it would be upheld when it came into conflict with other freedoms. But their appeal fell on deaf ears. Among those presenting their case was their parliamentary coordinator, Richard Kornicki, a former senior civil servant at the Home Office.
“The growing problem is what happens when different rights come into conflict with each other. The Government has ignored the issue in the Equality Bill, and intends simply to leave it up to the courts to sort out the problems. That is irresponsible,” he said this week.
Mr Kornicki is also the chairman of trustees of the influential Thomas More Legal Centre. Its national director, Neil Addison, is a barrister who is a member of the new Catholic spokespersons’ bureau Catholic Voices, launched this week (see Notebook, page 17). Mr Addison believes the Pope’s critics were particularly riled because he had framed his argument in terms they themselves liked to use. “A free society demands recognition of free institutions and organisations like the Catholic Church for the right to their own identity. It goes contrary to the anti-discrimination idea that we are all the same. The Pope was speaking up for diversity,” he told me.
Mr Addison accused the Government of hypocrisy over the Equality Bill, pointing out that political parties can reserve certain jobs for their supporters. “Why can’t the same principle apply to religions?” he asked.
But not all Catholics are supportive of the Church’s stand against the Equality Bill. Some are members of a coalition known as the Cutting Edge Consortium (CEC) including the MP Clare Short and members of the Roman Catholic Caucus of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement. In a statement on Tuesday, the CEC said it “strongly condemns Pope Benedict XVI’s unwarranted intrusion into the United Kingdom’s internal affairs, following his criticism of the UK’s Equality Bill”. The statement went on: “The Vatican has sought constantly to undermine European and United Nations measures which promote equality and diversity through anti-discriminatory policies and legislation.” One member of the caucus and CEC, Martin Pendergast, claimed that among those “most hurt” by the Church’s battle over the Equality Bill were not gay Catholics but their parents.
Several of the people I talked to detected more than a whiff of anti-Catholicism in some of the reporting of Pope Benedict’s alleged interference in the affairs of a “Protestant” country. A contributory factor to this mood may have been the Pope’s invitation to disaffected Anglicans to move en masse into the Catholic Church. Also cited is the evidence that Britons have become more tolerant of homosexuality and may therefore dislike the Church’s moral stance on the subject. Last week, the British Social Attitudes Survey published a report that said around one third (36 per cent) of those surveyed thought that sex between two men or two women was wrong. In 1983 the figure was 62 per cent.
But the Pope’s supporters make a point of highlighting the “illiberalism” of those who maintain he is not entitled to express a view. Pope Benedict is, after all, a stakeholder in the debate. There are some who believe that the bishops have hitherto failed to put their case forcefully against secularist intolerance. But perhaps they have made a start. Only last month, Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster commented that secularists were “just as dogmatic as the worst religious believer and sometimes more stridently so”.
At least the battle over the Equality Bill seems to be over. The Minister for Women and Equality, Harriet Harman, indicated on Tuesday that there would be no attempt to reintroduce the contentious amendment. She said her intention had never been to change the existing law.
“We have never insisted on non-discrimination legislation applying to religious jobs such as being a vicar, a bishop, an imam or a rabbi,” she said. “However, when it comes to non-religious jobs, those organisations must comply with the law. We thought that it would be helpful for everyone involved to clarify the law, and that is what the amendment that we brought forward aimed to do. That amendment was rejected. So the law remains as it was.”
With the general election expected in May, the Government would risk losing the entire bill if it reintroduced the amendment and indulged in a time-consuming game of “parliamentary ping-pong” between the Commons and the Lords.
It is the outcome of that election which will determine whether the Church can expect more of the same or an entirely new political landscape and the prospect of wholly different pressure points by the time the Pope arrives in September.