Equal in Dignity… or Indignity?

Civitas, 3 February 2010

In November 2000, the European Union issued a directive intended to provide ‘a general framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation’.

While designed to prohibit employers from discriminating  on grounds of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, its fourth article expressly stated that ‘the Directive shall not prejudice the right of churches… to require individuals working for them to act in good faith and with loyalty to the organisation’s ethos.’

Last week, bishops in the House of Lords, together with other peers sympathetic to their outlook, defeated a series of government-backed amendments to the Equality Bill that, had they been  adopted, would have prevented churches from being able to employ personnel in the manner the directive said that they would be able to do.

The government may yet, however, decide to reinstate the removed clauses. Doubtless it was to dissuade it from so doing that yesterday Pope Benedict made an  unprecedented intervention in British domestic politics.

Addressing a group of visiting British Catholic bishops in Rome, he said:

‘Your country is well known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society. Yet… the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations in the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs. In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.’

With an upcoming general election and the Roman Catholic vote at stake, it was clearly the Pope’s intention to apply pressure upon Gordon Brown’s administration to induce it to refrain from antagonising the Church by reinstating the clauses it considered an unwarranted threat.

That intervention has understandably enraged those with little patience with the sexual ethics espoused by the Roman Church.

In the vanguard of those who have taken exception to the Pope’s intervention has been the National Secular Society which is planning to organise demonstrations when he visits Britain later this year. It all promises to get very ugly which is a great shame.

While the Roman Church and the National Secular Society are unlikely to see eye to eye on the ethics of homosexuality, one might have hoped some form of modus vivendi might have been able to be reached whereby people with very different outlooks could tolerate each others’ ways of living despite considering them deeply misguided morally speaking.

Sadly, the autonomy the Church is claiming for itself seems more than the secular lobby is willing to allow.

While the European Union might possibly have helped curb the aggressive nationalisms of the past which erupted in war between member states, the intrusiveness of some of its directives has only served to exacerbate cultural conflicts that now threaten to turn very ugly.

Endorsing yesterday’s comments by the Pope, Peter Smith, Archbishop of Cardiff, said:

‘The Church, of course, upholds absolutely the equal dignity of every person… But there is a misunderstanding: sometimes in government legislation equality seems to mean that we are all absolutely equal, which we are not. We are equal in dignity.’

For the moment, however, the Pope’s intervention seems only to have led to equal indignity.

For those dismayed by all the acrymony, here is a pick-me-up.