The Spectator’s Notes | 3 February 2007

Will we look back on the last quarter of the 20th century as the only time since the Reformation when Roman Catholics have really been tolerated in Britain? During the long period in which Cardinal Basil Hume was Archbishop of Westminster, the Catholic Church came out of the ghetto. The row about gay adoption shows that this process is now going into reverse. The New Labour enthusiasm for homosexuality is so great that anyone who does not share it is to be prevented by law from full participation in the life of society. Both Tony Blair and David Cameron accept this public doctrine, though they pull long faces about the effect on children, as if it were not in their power to prevent it. The sad lesson is that the honourable Hume-ian attempt of the Church to engage with the wider world has weakened its position. The letter which Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the present Cardinal-Archbishop, wrote to the Prime Minister emphasised that Catholic adoption was sometimes permitted to single parents, that homosexuals should be accepted, and that children could be placed with adoptive parents who were not Catholic and not even religious. But it was not right, he said, that the Church be compelled to offer equal rights to gay couples because ‘marital love involves an essential complementarity of male and female’. This extreme reasonableness has the perverse effect of making the refusal to accept homosexual couples look almost arbitrary: neither marriage nor religion is necessarily insisted on by the Church as qualifications for adoption, but two blokes shacked up together are beyond the pale. The Cardinal would have been on stronger ground — and won more popular support — if he had conceded less to the new establishment in the first place. In a way, the Church has little to worry about.