Remember, remember

Today is Guy Fawkes Day in the UK. It’s not a holiday in the sense that you get out of school or off work; but tonight across the realm there will be fireworks and bonfires lit (along with suitable amounts of drinking) to celebrate the exposure and foiling of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and King James I on this date in 1605.

Guy Fawkes wasn’t the leader of the plot, but he was the one charged with its execution (so to speak). Having been a mercenary fighting for the Catholic League and the Spaniards against the Protestant Dutch, he presumably had the experience necessary to handle barrels of gunpowder and set the charges.

He did, but the plot was revealed via a letter warning a Catholic Member of Parliament to stay away on the 5th. One thing led to another, the gunpowder was discovered (“Oi, mate—did you order 30 barrels of black powder and all this firewood and coal?”), Fawkes was apprehended and duly tortured to reveal the names of co-conspirators. (Unsuccessfully—as “interrogators” in our current foreign wars have learned, torture isn’t a good means of acquiring reliable information.)

Eventually there was a trial, but the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Fawkes cheated the hangman, though: he jumped from the gallows and broke his neck.

I’m guessing the executioners went ahead with the drawing and quartering, however.

Since the 18th Century, effigies of Fawkes, “guys”, have been burnt in bonfires with much gaiety on this night.

Now, while I think it’s a good thing indeed to foil mass murder plots (even when the prospective victims are politicians), there’s something about continuing this tradition of dissing Catholics down into the 21st Century that just creeps me out.

It’s not that I was baptized in the Roman Church, it’s this holdover from the time when where you worshiped defined your entire existence for good or ill. I mean—that’s so 19th Century. (Okay, people over here were certain that JFK would be taking all his marching orders from the Pope; but we got over that.)

But the Brits are stuck in this time warped mentality in which Catholics = Satan-worshiping-overthrowers-of-civilization.

Just last year, there was major hoopla over one of Her Majesty’s grandsons being affianced to a Canadian commoner…Catholic. Under the Act of Settlement, passed in 1701, no one can be in line for the British throne if s/he is or marries a Catholic.

(You can marry/be a militant Muslim, a Moonie, a Wiccan, a foot-washin’ Baptist or a Baha’i and ascend to the throne. But Catholic? Fuggedaboutit.)

So Autumn Kelly, who married Peter Phillips last year, converted from Catholicism to save her husband from having to give up his place in line to the throne.

There was talk, right up to two months before the nuptials, of Phillips renouncing his place in the royal succession, but in the end his situation was deemed more important than her faith, and she caved.

(BTW—he’s 11th in line to the throne. The royal yacht would have to go down with most of his close relatives on it to make him any sort of a contender. That just boggles my mind. I have as much chance at winning the Powerball as he does of becoming King Peter.)

And it’s not like the Royals are the same old Bastions of Propriety and Examples to the Nation they’ve been ever since Victoria and Albert. Phillips and Kelly sold the “rights” to their wedding for £500K to Hello! magazine. (If you don’t know the rag, it makes People magazine look like the New Yorker.) By all accounts Her Majesty was Not Amused.

Evidently they needed the cash to pay for the nuptials, even though the service was held at Saint George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, and I’m sure the Queen hardly charged them more than £25 for it.

(She might have wanted more for the reception, held at Frogmore House in the Castle grounds. At least some kind of damage deposit. But still.)

This whole aversion to Catholicism is related to the monarch being the head of the Church of England, which emerged from Henry VIII having the hots for Anne Boleyn (and the possibility of producing a son who wouldn't die in infancy) and needing a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which Pope Clement VII refused to give him. For centuries after Henry declared the papacy irrelevant, all non-CoE followers were required to support the established church with their taxes. So if you were a Methodist, you were voluntarily giving money to your chapel and involuntarily giving money to the Anglicans.

That’s one of the reasons why our Founding Fathers slipped that separation of church and state clause in the First Amendment. That established church thing just rankled. (A lot of the provisions in the Constitution were reactions to British governing practices.)

There’s been talk, post-Phillips, of finally getting around to repealing the Catholic part of the Act of Settlement, seeing as to how the Catholic Church and its followers aren’t the danger they were in the 16th and 17th centuries. Really, the Pope, the Cardinals and the Bishops have too much on their plates to consider invading Britain in the name of the True Church. The cover-ups and payoffs for pedophile priests in the US alone would keep the entire Jesuit order occupied in civil litigation until 2050. And after that the Church couldn't afford an invasion.

However, even if the Act is repealed or amended, I won’t hold out hope that the latent anti-Catholic animosity that underlies Guy Fawkes Day will disappear. I think that’s bred in the bone.