According to a recent report in The Times, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, could be offered a seat in the House of Lords upon his retirement. The rumours started around the time of Gordon Brown’s recent meeting with the Pope, and when questioned on the subject during an interview with the The Tablet the PM conspicuously failed to rule it out, saying: "These are things to be discussed at a later stage."
If nothing else, this is shrewd: the government knows that it needs to reconnect with the traditional Labour Catholic vote. Even before the last general election, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor suggested that the Labour party was no longer the natural party of choice for Catholic voters. Since then the Labour Party has embarked on a series of controversial measures that could hardly have been calculated to offend Catholic voters more: the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill, a proposal to impose quotas for non-Catholic students on Catholic Schools, the obligation for Catholic Adoption Agencies to take homosexual couples onto their book of potential adoptive parents.
North of the border, the Scottish Nationalists are using these issues to split Catholic voters from the Labour base while the Conservative Party, partly under the influence of Catholic former leader Iain Duncan Smith and his Centre for Social Justice, has been making all the right pro-family noises. Vague hints at the Cardinal’s peerage, along with his recent visit to the Vatican and talking up of the common cause over global poverty, could provide some grist to Brown’s "son of the manse" mill.
And vague rumour, never to be realised, could be all there is to it. After all, the canon law of the Catholic Church prohibits a cleric from taking up a post which involves the exercise of civil power (how’s that for a separation of church from state). The late Basil Hume was offered a peerage by three different Prime Ministers—James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair—and never took up the offer, partly on this basis.
If, however, the cardinal is offered and accepts a seat, it is likely to restart a heated debate about the role of religious representation in the House of Lords. Currently, twenty-six Bishops of the Church of England sit in the House of Lords. Five of these—the sitting Bishops of Canterbury, York, London, Durham and Winchester—have places ex officio. The remaining 21 sit by order of seniority, measured by date of first appointment.
Research conducted by Theos in 2006 suggested that the bishops were increasingly active, but not in a concerted way – they do not have ‘a whip’ and do not vote as a block; there’s usually only one or two of them there on any given day, either on the basis of a rota they agree on internally or to speak on issues which, in one way or another, they have developed an expertise. The bishops’ bench could, at worst, be considered an anodyne influence or, more kindly, as a fairly enlightened, progressive and compassionate force in the House. There’s certainly no land grab for political influence, in spite of what the National Secular Society would have us believe.
More to the point, there is a tradition of appointing leaders or former leaders from other religious traditions. Baroness Richardson of Calow was appointed a peer in 1997 and retained her position as moderator of The Free Churches council for two years after that. Lord Jakobovits was made a Peer in 1988 and remained Chief Rabbi until 1991. Able and politically minded former bishops, such as David Sheppard and Richard Harries, are occasionally given life peerages. In not one of these cases were objections raised to an appointment on the basis of the religiosity of the individual in question: what mattered was that they would provide political and moral leadership and apply hard earned practical wisdom to the legislative questions of the day.
On this basis, a life peerage for Cormac Murphy O’Connor would be entirely appropriate. For secularist groups, this will be indicative of an ongoing religious power grab and an unwarranted supinity of the establishment towards vocal and aggressive minorities. Worse still – and I suggest that this may be at the heart of it – they fear the influence of Rome.
Labour MEP and secularist Mary Honeyball recently bemoaned the “vice like grip” of Catholicism across Europe and suggested that, “in the light of their predilection to favour the Pope's word above the government's” Ruth Kelly, Des Browne and Paul Murphy should not be allowed on the government front bench. This is reminiscent of William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England: “while they [Catholics] acknowledge a foreign power [the Pope], superior to the sovereignty of the kingdom, they cannot complain if the laws of that kingdom will not treat them upon the footing of good subjects.” In the 1760s, that may have been a legitimate concern. Now it’s just prejudice.
It almost goes without saying that having a legislative chamber that is made up by appointment is problematic, though not without some advantages. In this strange but not ineffective system, Cormac Murphy O’Connor could make a valuable contribution. The aggressive reaction of secularists towards such a development not only exposes the illiberal nature of their position but, worse than that, bears the hallmarks of an old but unattractive British habit: anti-Catholicism.
Paul Bickley is Senior Researcher at Theos
