Ecumenical Marriage Bill [HL]

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 23rd February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to lend support to the Ecumenical Marriage Bill that the noble Lord, Lord Deben, has laid before your Lordships’ House. I have two reasons for doing so. One concerns ecumenism and the other concerns marriage, and I will take them in that order.

First, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, who has just resumed his seat, that this does not concern doctrine. I was concerned at the end of his remarks to hear him use the word “dictate”. The whole point about this Bill is that it does not dictate to anybody. I was pleased to hear his response to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, which might represent a way forward. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester said at the end of his remarks that he will reflect on the arguments laid before your Lordships’ House by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, earlier on, and the Church of England Synod would be a good place for this proposal to be taken to.

But the right reverend Prelate also based some of his argument on the constitutional question. I would simply refer him to the Library Note, which states:

“Under the Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act 1919, Parliament has a role scrutinising legislation which relates to the administration and organisation of the Church of England”.


Whether you look to the 1919 legislation or in this case the 1949 Marriage Act, which the noble Lord, Lord Deben, referred to in his remarks, Parliament has had a very clear role. Parliament itself has a right to have a view about these things and to consider measures of this kind. That this should now go to the synod before we reach Committee so that some of the points raised by the right reverend Prelate earlier on might be considered, is a perfectly proper point of view to put. I hope that the right reverend Prelate will have a chance to reflect on what I thought were some terrific points made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, in his introductory remarks.

The central point about this Bill is that it lays no mandatory duty on the Church of England but is an empowering measure that simply removes an accidental statutory impediment to the enablement of clergy from other denominations to bring together couples in holy matrimony in a parish church. As the noble Lord reminded us, that does not force anyone to do this, but simply allows them to, and with the same restrictions about what is already permitted for funerals, baptisms and communion services.

My own parents married at the time of the passage of the 1949 legislation. That legislation did not require Anglican parish churches to register for marriages. They were deemed to be licensed; but the law states that marriage was to be, as the noble Lord mentioned earlier on,

“according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England”.

That was never intended as a restriction, but in an era when ecumenical relationships were much less common, it was simply a statement of fact. It was the reality. When in those unecumenical times marriages were made across the divide, they were often the source of bitterness, rejection and hostility. My own parents experienced that. They were Anglican and Catholic—a demobbed Eighth Army Desert Rat marrying an Irish-speaking girl from Mayo. My mother’s younger sister married a Northern Ireland Protestant and both marriages took place in a Catholic Church.

Sixty years later, echoing something that the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said at the beginning of his remarks about funerals, my Anglican father was buried from that same Catholic Church where he had married after a funeral led by my late father-in-law, who was an Anglican priest of some 60 years standing. He spent some of his ministry in the right reverend Prelate’s diocese. I was delighted that, far from there being a restriction on my father-in-law conducting the service, the parish priest was hugely supportive and generous to a fault. It also represented a sea-change in attitudes. I might add to the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, that I am godfather to children from other denominations but, equally, my own children, who were baptised as Catholics, have godparents from other denominations. That was not an impediment. My uncle told me, after the funeral of my father, that he would have never believed the progress and change in relationships that had occurred in the intervening years. He said that he had felt a great healing.

Thirty years ago, I too married across the denominational divide and, for good measure, I married a vicar’s daughter with eight ordained Anglican clergy in the family—they still have not made me perfect either. But we would be foolish to forget how painful former times could be. In the 1950s, when as young people couples like my parents married, some bishops even refused to say the Lord’s Prayer together or to stand alongside one another at the war memorial. Sectarianism rather than ecumenism was the order of the day. In Liverpool, as late as 1958, the city’s Catholic Archbishop John Heenan, later Cardinal Heenan, was literally stoned by a sectarian mob while making a pastoral visit to a sick parishioner in the Scotland Road parish of St Anthony’s.

I went to Liverpool as a student and later had the honour to serve in that city for 18 years as a constituency MP. It was mired in sectarianism. I was shocked to witness at meetings of the city council, to which I had been elected, hostile opposition to minor improvements to Catholic primary schools on purely sectarian grounds. But that is not the end of the story. Thanks to Archbishop Derek Worlock, Bishop Sheppard—later Lord Sheppard —and successive moderators of the Merseyside free churches, I was privileged to see what is known as the “Mersey Miracle” and the coming together of Christians from different backgrounds, who took as their maxim “What we can do together, let us do it, and let us ensure that what separates us does not turn us into enemies”. The fruits of this practical ecumenism were vividly exemplified by the visit to Liverpool, in 1982, of Pope John Paul II, witnessed by 1 million people. Movingly, the Pope’s first steps were taken in that city at the Anglican cathedral, before travelling along the well-named Hope Street to the Catholic cathedral of Christ the King.

The Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Deben, has been written to reflect that spirit of enabling ecumenism to continue and to deepen. It will empower but not require the parochial church council, the incumbent and the diocesan bishop to allow other Christian marriages to be celebrated. Despite what the right reverend Prelate said about how this could become bureaucratic, in reality it would become based on good will and precedent. I believe that, once those precedents have been established, it would happen very easily and smoothly where people wanted it to happen. That would force them to face the question that the noble Lord put to the House about whether we really are serious about how far we want this ecumenical journey to go. It might also enable a sometimes sceptical secular world to echo the observations of the pagans of Rome, who said to their own bewilderment about the early Christians, “See how they love one another”.

That brings me to my second reason for supporting the noble Lord’s Bill. Probably the best £4 that two people who love one another can spend is on a marriage certificate. It is sometimes said that marriages are made in heaven but broken here on earth. According to the Office for National Statistics, around 42% of marriages end in divorce and around half of these divorces are expected to occur in the first 10 years of marriage. To Christians, a church wedding may not guarantee the durability of a marriage, but the solemnising of vows and the binding through the sacrament of holy matrimony does at least create a different narrative against which to live out and to attempt to lead your married life through all its ups and downs. We should do everything we can to encourage this sacrament to be taken seriously, not least because we know what the negative consequences are when a marriage ends. The Bill simply opens up the prospect of more church marriages and, in a modest way, for Parliament and the Church to say that this can contribute to stable families, stable communities and a stable society.

To conclude, the Church of England is already ecumenically generous—I so agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said about this—in allowing its churches to be used by other denominations. It is evident here at Westminster in the use of our parliamentary crypt Chapel of St Mary Undercroft. The noble Lord’s Bill involves no compulsion; it merely removes an impediment for the principle to be extended. Some say the Bill is not necessary, as another denomination can have permission to use a church as long as the service is taken by an Anglican clergyman, but there is no such restriction on any other service, yet this is the service when it is most likely that the happy couple would like to be married by someone who matters to them spiritually.

The three key reasons for giving the Bill a Second Reading are: first, that it is necessary to remove a legal impediment; secondly, that it gives the Church of England the power to add marriage to existing provisions but no direction; and, thirdly, that it enshrines all the safeguards the Church of England has already included in its canon law to cover other services. Even if, at the conclusion of our debate, there is not a peal of bells welcoming the noble Lord’s Bill, I hope that we will give it a ringing endorsement and a Second Reading.