THE ACT OF SETTLEMENT AND THE VATICAN

Dateline: 12th January 2000

A correspondent to a national newspaper (9th January) claimed that the Act of Settlement's prohibition of the marriage of a British Monarch to a catholic is intolerance. If the Roman Catholic Church were merely another denomination of Christianity then this might be true.

Unfortunately the Vatican is not a Church, it is a State, and an imperial State at that. It is also the centre of an absolutist Church which describes others as heretics, itself as "the only true faith" and insists on the totalitarian principle that children of a mixed marriage must be brought up as Catholics. Its social and economic theories have always and everywhere invaded the body politic in particular in its absolute rejection of the democratic Italian Nation which arose in the 1860's and whose existence the Vatican fought to extinguish for 40years. Today, thanks to the European Union, that ambition is near to fruition!

The Vatican's centuries-old imperial-religious ambitions are still being realised. The latest example being the ethnic cleansing of Orthodox Christians from the Krajina in former Yugoslavia and the re-establishment of what was the most blood soaked clerical political state in Europe - Croatia, whose modern founder, Franjo Tudjman wrote in a 1989 book "Genocide is a natural phenomenon, it is commanded by the Almighty in defence of the only true faith (Roman Catholicism) ".

The vast majority of loyal British Catholics cannot diminish the unchanging political aspirations of the Vatican as the close association of the European Union with the bloodthirsty bigot and European Empire builder, Charlemagne testifies.

The Act of Settlement is not bigotry, it is to this day a necessary defence against bigotry and the dangerous fusion of political and religious ambitions in one institution.