Worthy defender of faith

L’état, c’est moi may never have been uttered by Louis XIV or indeed anyone, but it still carries a certain truth. When Queen Elizabeth II visits Italy this week and pays an informal call on Pope Francis in the Vatican, just as when President Michael Higgins of Ireland visits her more formally during his state visit to London on Tuesday, they will be more than mere private individuals. They represent their people as well as their state; and their public display of friendship is symbolic of those broader relationships. State visits and visits of heads of state do occasionally happen when relationships are chilly, but it is rare indeed for such events to make them chillier.

Between the Irish president, the Queen and the Pope, there is an underlying common factor – the long and troubled history between the British State and the Roman Catholic religion. No one in Britain needs look hard to find the evidence, for every coin carries the motto conveyed by the letters “FD”: Fidei Defensor. The fact that it is in Latin is also a clue. The title was awarded to Henry VIII in 1521 by Pope Leo X, as a reward for his Defence of the Seven Sacraments  (in Latin). Pope Paul II snatched it back after Henry’s breach with Rome; and Parliament re-awarded it in 1544.

No monarch since then has deserved it more than Henry’s present successor, for the Queen is a shining example of Christian leadership in a secular world. She was the official host for the state visit of Benedict to Britain in 2010, and quickly transformed what could have been a stormy episode in British-Catholic relations into a moment of renewal and grace. She set the stage for Benedict's thoughtful and sensitive contributions to the national debate.

But there is much more to be said than that. The Queen has helped set the tone of modern Anglicanism through her unostentatious but deeply committed role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. This symbolic – but not “purely symbolic” – presence of Christianity in the life of the nation still means a great deal to people outside the Established Church as well as those within it. Fidei Defensor says it well.

The Queen’s state visit to Ireland in 2011 was a watershed not just in Anglo-Irish relations but in the feelings ordinary  people in the two nations have for each other – not least between north and south in Ireland itself. The notion of the Queen as a Protestant head of state had been used to alienate Irish Catholics and was a factor in the Troubles; but thanks also to the then Irish president, Mary McAleese, personality overcame prejudice once more. The sight of the present Irish president being honoured by the British Queen in Buckingham Palace will cement that tectonic shift, and may remind Irish statesmen that there is an empty seat waiting to be claimed at the Commonwealth table that is theirs by right. Ireland pulls more than its weight in the world already, the Queen may gently point out, and the more it does so, the better.