Recent public discussions about changing or abolishing the 1701 Act of Settlement, forbidding members of the British Royal Family from marrying a Catholic, have been quietly shelved.
The Church England raised significant logical objections, centring on the sovereign’s dual role as Monarch and head of the Anglican Church.
Church of England leaders were concerned that if a future heir to the British throne married a Roman Catholic, their children, by the Catholic Church’s canon law, are required to be brought up as Catholic.
The constitutionally problematic situation would result in the Supreme Governor of the Church of England possibly being a Roman Catholic.
English Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg began work on making the way for members of the Royal Family to marry a Catholic in order to introduce full equality between the faiths and to end the common law principle of males having first right to the throne.
A spokesman for Mr Clegg said: “The Government accepts there are provisions [in the Act] which could be discriminatory.
“Amending the laws regarding succession to the throne is a complex and difficult matter that requires careful and thoughtful consideration.”
A spokesman for the Anglican Church said that although the Act of Succession appeared “anomalous” in the modern world, while the Church of England remained the established religion, the monarch and Supreme Governor could not owe a higher loyalty elsewhere.
“The prohibition on those in the line of succession marrying Roman Catholics derives from an earlier age and inevitably looks anomalous, not least when there is no prohibition on marriage to those of other faiths or none.”
“But if the prohibition were removed the difficulty would still remain that establishment requires the monarch to join in communion with the Church of England as its Supreme Governor and that is not something that a Roman Catholic would be able to do consistently with the current rules of that church.”
Before Autumn Kelly married Peter Phillips, the oldest son of the Princess Royal who is 11th in line to the throne, she converted from Catholicism to Anglicanism.
Thirty years earlier, Prince Michael of Kent, the Queen’s cousin, renounced his position in the line of succession in order to marry the then Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, a Roman Catholic divorcee.
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