May it please Your Majesty
The Religion and Morals Committee of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland learned with shock and dismay of the recent visit of Archbishop Hein, the Pope’s apostolic delegate to Britain, to Buckingham Palace. If, as has been suggested by the Press, this visit was linked to a proposed visit by the Pope to this country, we as loyal Protestant subjects of Your Majesty, view this matter in an even more serious light.
We would remind Your Majesty of the solemn oaths sworn at the outset of your reign to inviolably maintain and defend the true Protestant religion. By these oaths and promises solemnly given in the presence of Almighty God, we understand that any recognition of the Pope of Rome and of the Roman Catholic faith was renounced and allegiance to the Protestant religion unequivocally and expressly made. In view of these solemn undertakings, we are dismayed that recognition should be given in any way to the Pope of Rome or his representatives. The blasphemous claims made by the Pope to be Christ’s Vicar on earth and to possess infallibility in his official utterances, mark him out as the Antichrist of Scripture. Any place given to the Pope or his representative, therefore, not only imperils Your Majesty’s throne, but the nation as a whole.
It is as the Protestant Queen of a Protestant land that Your Majesty’s Protestant subjects give you their whole-hearted loyalty, and we are persuaded that Your Majesty’s Protestant subjects would deeply regret anything that might intervene to place that loyalty in jeopardy.
Accordingly we humbly plead with Your Majesty not to receive the Pope’s representatives, nor to give your consent to a visit to this country of the Pope of Rome, but to maintain to the utmost of our power the solemn undertakings given at the outset of Your Majesty’s reign on behalf of the Protestant religion.
We pray that the Lord may bless Your Majesty with the riches of His grace in Christ Jesus.
On behalf of the Committee, etc.