Henry VIII and his predicament with his first wife
Last night was another quiet night. My feet are blowing up and my two small toes are deformed, although they don't hurt.
Today breakfast at the Whitechapel Mission became a bit of a circus. Alcohol is not permitted, but this guy arrived with a beer anyway. He was so drunk that he started dancing and singing while everybody else was trying to eat – some were even asleep because last night was so cold.
It's very easy to spot the hard drinkers in the Mission. They hardly have the coordination to put food in their mouths, and are dirty and unshaven. Alcohol is a killer of an addiction - it destroys everything that is human.
On the subject of the Whitechapel Mission, ever since I wrote that I watch with intent the weather forecast on Sky News, they have turned the TV over to the Discovery Channel. Really, is there anything on television more removed from the life of homeless people than what is to be found on the Discovery Channel in the early hours of the morning?! The guys here must agree with me too, because there is not a single person (that includes among the staff) that watches TV anymore. The mission should know how easy it is to get the weather forecast on the internet.
Today, while reading the History Today magazine in the library (oops, now it too will disappear), I learnt that the British public supported Edward VIII in 1936 and that he could have married American divorcee Wallis Simpson and still be King. Surely that can only mean that the majority of British people support secular government? In 2000, the Liberal Democrats voted overwhelmingly in favour of ending the Queen's right to be head of the Church of England. I didn't know that.
The Queen as supreme head of the Church of England was actually a by-product of King Henry VIII's obsession with producing a male heir. By 1530 Henry's wife, Catherine of Aragon, was too old to have any more children and the need to maintain dynasty legitimacy forced Henry to seek an annulment from Pope Clement VII in order to marry Anne Boleyn. The Pope stalled on the issue for seven years without making a final judgement, partially because he was a virtual prisoner of Catherine's nephew King Charles of Spain, who had conquered Rome.
Things came to a head in 1533 when Anne Boleyn became pregnant. Henry had to act, and his solution was to reject the power of the Pope in England and to have Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, declare his marriage to Catherine invalid. The Pope responded with excommunication, and parliamentary legislation enacting Henry's decision to break with the Roman Catholic Church soon followed. The Act of Supremacy in 1534 named Henry "the only supreme head of the Church of England".
Today, Britain's parliament shares a feature with the elected assemblies of an Islamic republic: every day's proceedings start with a prayer. The House of Lords is the only legislature in the world where unelected Christian bishops (26 of them) have full voting rights. However, the UK is widely regarded as one of the least religious countries in the world with fewer than 8% going to church. And yet Britain is far from secular. The government defers to the religious at every turn, such as funding more than 7000 'faith schools', which accounts for one-third of all the state schools. The majority are Christian but other faiths have sought and won equal treatment. There are at least 36 Jewish, seven Muslim and two Sikh state-funded schools. Muslims are seeking funding for a further 150 schools.
It is interesting to note that the Queen at her coronation was asked, "Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law?" To which she replied, "All this I promise and do." Prince Charles is known to be keen to modernise the monarchy and has spoken about being a "defender of faiths" rather than the present oath which makes the monarch the "Defender of the [Christian] Faith". He has also told senior staff that he would want his coronation to be a "multi-faith" experience in contrast to the heavily Christian service of his mother's coronation in 1952. Does that mean that the House of Lords is going to become multi-faith too, and unelected leaders of the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Sikh, and other religious communities are also going to be given full voting rights?
According to the UK National Secular Society, there should be a clear distinction between state and religion, as there is supposed to be in the US and France. The US is the best example of a country founded on a separation of church and state. The first amendment to its constitution reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting free expression thereof." Christopher Hitchens, the US-based British writer, is convinced that the American way is best and argues this in his book God is Not Great, which will be published next spring.
French Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu regarded religion as divisive, benighted and intolerant. Surely the fact that Declan and I are now sleeping rough in London (not to mention that I was assaulted in our patch at 4.05am yesterday morning), is one morsel of evidence that this is truth?
