Sir, – Thomas Ryan’s letter (June 13th) in response to Paul Linehan (June 11th) concerning the law against Catholics sitting on the British throne is misleading and facetious.
As Mr Ryan says, it would indeed be unusual for the head of the Church of England to be a Catholic or indeed from any faith other than the one he or she leads. The problem, however, is not the religious beliefs of the monarch, rather that any head of state really should not be a religious leader in the first place.
This principle is known as the separation of church and state and is one of the core concepts of democracy. This is so widely accepted as a basic democratic principle that the only other country that ignores it, apart from Britain, that I can think of offhand, is Iran where the Ayatollah Khamenei is the supreme leader. – Yours, etc,