Bishop of Rochester Questions Prince of Wales as Defender of Faith

|TOP|One of the Anglican Church’s senior figures, the Bishop of Rochester, has come out to question the Prince of Wales’ expressed desire to be the defender of all faiths, as opposed to just Christianity.

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, a convert from Islam, said that the differences between faiths made it impossible to defend all of them, reports The Press Association.

The Prince of Wales first expressed the desire to become a “Defender of Faith” as opposed to a “Defender of the Faith” in a 1994 interview in which he suggested that the title held by all British monarchs since Henry VIII implied that they would protect only Christians.

But Bishop Nazir-Ali came out to refute the Prince of Wales’ intentions saying that such a move towards a multifaith monarchy would not be possible.

"The coronation service is such that whoever takes the oaths actually takes oaths to defend the Christian faith - 'the Catholic faith', actually, he will have to say," he told Today.

|AD|"Having said that, if by saying that he meant that he wanted to uphold the freedom of people of every faith, then I have no quarrel with that. But you can't defend every faith, because there are very serious differences among them."

He also claimed that it was not the members of other religions that were putting on pressure for the distinctly Christian character of places like hospital chapels to be replaced with neutral spaces.

Rather Bishop Nazir-Ali claimed that the pressure for such changes came from “secularisers” who have the intention of taking faith completely out of British society.

When asked about one case in which a doctor’s surgery asked a Christian minister not to bless it because it would be used by the members of different faith communities, he said, "I doubt it would offend anyone of any religion”.

“The people it does offend are the secularisers who want to level us down to a lowest common denominator, so that faith doesn't make any impact on society whatsoever."

The Bishop of Rochester’s comments follow his criticism earlier in the week of fellow bishops in the Anglican Church who have failed to unite and take action to fight off the growing threat to Britain’s Christian identity and heritage.

Bishop Nazir-Ali criticised bishops for failing to act in allowing chapels and key Christian activities in institutions such as prisons and hospitals to be reduced to a “multi-faith mishmash”.