Scottish Catholic Observer

The Prince of Wales has expressed his opposition to the UK Government’s plans to reform the laws that govern the royal line of succession, including the anti-Catholic Act of Settlement, according to reports     this week.

Prince Charles is said to believe that changing the rules which give male heirs priority and stops members of the Royal Family from marrying Catholics could have ‘unintended consequences.’

The prince was understood to have raised a series of critical questions at a private meeting with Richard Heaton, permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, according to a UK newspaper.  The issue of the succession rules was brought into focus by the announcement of the Duchess of Cambridge’s pregnancy.

Prince Charles is reported to have raised concerns in the meeting with Mr Heaton about what would happen if his grandchild were to be allowed to marry a Catholic, as the Government has proposed, as it raises the prospect of a future heir to the throne’s children being brought up in the Catholic Faith.

Reports suggested that Prince Charles had been told such a problem could be resolved by negotiations with the Vatican—a solution he was said to have found ‘unsatisfactory and unconvincing.’

The coalition Government intended to rush through changes to the relevant legislation using procedures usually reserved for anti-terror laws, in the wake of the Duchess of Cambridge’s pregnancy.

The change will need to be legislated for all 16 Commonwealth realms.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien has previously pointed out that current legislation not only forbids a Catholic to accede to the British throne, but also stipulates that anyone in line to the throne who marries a Catholic forfeits their claim to the monarchy.

“I find it sad that there would still be something like that on the legislative statutes,” the cardinal said last year. “This law forbidding Catholics to sit on the throne—or preventing anyone who is monarch from marrying a Catholic—is deeply upsetting.

The cardinal has described that portion of the Act of Settlement as evidence of Britain’s blatantly anti-Catholic character.

Reports of the prince’s concerns come as he disclosed in an interview how the prospect of becoming a grandfather has reinforced his environmental beliefs because he does not want to ‘hand on an increasingly dysfunctional world decline to comment.

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—     This story was reported in full in the January 11 print edition of the SCO