The Queen and the Pope
“When Pope Benedict visits this country next year, he is expected to stay at Buckingham Palace as a guest of the Queen.” So says The Daily Telegraph. More significantly it reports that she has “grown increasingly sympathetic” to the Roman Catholic Church, being “appalled” at the increasing liberalism in the Church of England. The newspaper is sure of its information, saying it came from “senior sources at the Vatican”, via The Catholic Herald.
We cannot say if there has been information manipulation, but we can well believe that the Queen is dissatisfied at the gross liberalism of England’s national Church. However, if she is also increasingly sympathetic to the Roman Church, it will appal those of her many Protestant subjects who prize the United Kingdom’s “Protestant Reformed religion established by law”, which, before her people, she solemnly vowed to maintain.
We are sure that the objective of the Pope’s state visit is not so much pastoral or ecumenical as political. Joseph Ratzinger will be coming to Britain in September (if God does not prevent it) primarily in his capacity as head of state, of the Vatican City. No previous pope has stepped on our soil specifically and officially as a head of state.
Although Ratzinger chose not to be crowned when he became pope, he has not renounced the arrogant claim of successive popes to be “Father of princes and kings, Ruler of the world, Vicar of our Saviour Jesus Christ” – a claim that is symbolised by the papal triple crown. “The Pope,” wrote Thomas Aquinas, one of Rome’s principal theologians, “is top of both powers [spiritual and temporal]; so that, when any one [ruler] is excommunicated for apostasy, his subjects are, ipso facto, freed from his dominion, and from their oath of allegiance.”
Thomas M’Crie is right when he says “that this pretension to temporal authority is necessarily involved in the assumption by the Pope of the character of the Vicar-general of Christ on earth. There can be no doubt that all power is given to Christ in heaven and earth, and every Pope who claims to be His representative, in this high character must, in spite of himself, lay claim to that extravagant authority which the Hildebrands and Bonifaces of past times had the boldness to avow. This is the very blasphemy of the Man of Sin, that he claims to be the representative of Christ, not in His mercy, but in His majesty – not in His humanity, but in His deity. He calls himself, in so many words, ‘the vicar of God’, and by this fearful assumption, verifies to the letter what is written of him in the language of prophecy, ‘that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God’.”
May the eyes of the people of Britain be opened to see that the papacy is both the Antichrist and a totalitarian power. It is unremittingly resolved to enforce its claimed worldwide rule, not only throughout Europe but to the ends of the earth. It will deem it a major boost to its renewed ascendancy if it recovers what it regards as “Mary’s dowry” – this nominally-Protestant land of ours. The situation demands that we seek earnestly that Christ would come in the power of His Spirit to exercise His royal power in a manifest way and bring Britain and other nations to submit penitently to His merciful, liberating and glorious rule. “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth.” NMR