The King’s Oath by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · May 19, 1910

The King’s Oath

By C. M. S.

JUST previously to the accession of King Edward VII, there was much bitter contention in England over the form of the oath which the king must take at his coronation. The Catholics assailed the oath from the public platform and through the press, declaring it to be an insult to the Catholic subjects of the king and to the Catholic world in general. The king, of course, took the oath.

Edward VII is not yet buried, and already the conflict is renewed. The Irish Nationalists (Catholic) have opened the controversy with a demand for the revision of the oath. A report from London states that it is to be made an early political issue. The leader of the Irish Nationalist party has written to Premier Asquith, urging the removal from the king’s oath of those words which are offensive to the Catholics.

But those words which are offensive to the Catholics are the words which guarantee England against a Catholic king, and therefore against a Roman Catholic head of the English Catholic Church. In England church and state are united, and the king of England is head of the state church as well as of the state itself. The form of the king’s oath makes it impossible for a Roman Catholic ever to become king of England, and so head of the Church of England, without stultifying and perjuring himself. He has to declare his disbelief in any transubstantiation of the bread and wine of the sacrament into the body and blood of Christ; and that the adoration of the Virgin Mary or of any other saint, and the sacrifice of the mass as practised in the Roman Catholic Church, are superstitious and idolatrous. Furthermore, he must declare that he makes these declarations without any mental reservation or any dispensation granted him by the Pope for that purpose, or any hope of any such dispensation; or without thinking that he could be acquitted before God or men, even if the Pope should declare his oath null and void.

It is not to be wondered at that Catholics feel offended at the language of the oath their king must take, and there is no question but that it would be a very embarrassing situation for the English Catholic Church to have a Roman Catholic head in the person of their king, who as a Roman Catholic would be under the dominance of the Pope of Rome. Against such a contingency the king’s oath seems their only shield under the present arrangement.

Were there no union of church and state in England, the difficulty would be avoided. It is that anomalous and unwarranted union which makes such an oath on the part of the king necessary. And it has brought many other unpleasant situations in its train, such as the financial support of the state church by a nation which is only partly in sympathy with the tenets of that church organization. When the members of the independent churches have supported their own churches, they very naturally consider they have done their duty without helping to support the state church also. It matters not in what part of the world that unjust régime is carried out, its result is dissatisfaction and oppression. The separation of church and state is the solution of this class of difficulties.

C. M. S.