Coercion of Christians in Britain.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor has been looking distressed lately. In April, legislation will go into effect forcing Catholic adoption agencies to act against their religious principles and place children with homosexual partners. While there had been a dim hope that Prime Minister Tony Blair would allow an opt-out clause, Blair has now officially closed that door, effectively forcing Catholic adoption agencies across Great Britain to close their doors as well.

No small thing, since these Catholic adoption agencies are not only responsible for 32 percent of the voluntary adoption sector, they are renowned for their successful placements of particularly vulnerable children among the approximately 4,000 children currently awaiting adoption.

But the government justifies this with smiling sound-bites explaining that the Catholic Church has until 2008 to cope with the new legislation. This from the Mass-attending prime minister and his community secretary Ruth Kelly, reputed to be a member of Opus Dei. Go figure.

"This outcome is wholly avoidable," stated Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, primate of England and Wales, in a recent letter to the Blair cabinet. Indeed. But the totalitarian ideology driving this legislation is as ruthless as it is implacable. Despite the Cardinal having the full support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, Blair's Labour government remains unmoved by moral principles they appear to neither understand nor respect.

Attempting to justify the government's "non-exemption" policy, Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Education and Skills with responsibility for adoption, stated: "To me this is legislation to prevent discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and you cannot do that and at the same time allow discrimination in one area." Johnson is known for his lack of sympathy for traditional beliefs and for a background ideologically aligned with the Communist Party.

Not that anyone should be surprised. Such legislation is merely the natural outgrowth of the socialist mindset, which Pope Leo XIII warned against in Quod Apostolici Muneris, his encyclical of 1878.

"They leave nothing untouched or whole which by both human and divine laws has been wisely decreed for the health and beauty of life," His Holiness wrote. "They refuse obedience to the higher powers, to whom, according to the admonition of the Apostle, every soul ought to be subject, and who derive the right of governing from God; and they proclaim the absolute equality of all men in rights and duties. They debase the natural union of man and woman, which is held sacred even among barbarous peoples; and its bond, by which the family is chiefly held together, they weaken, or even deliver up to lust."

The logical result?

"By a new species of impiety, unheard of even among the heathen nations, states have been constituted without any count at all of God or of the order established by him; it has been given out that public authority neither derives its principles, nor its majesty, nor its power of governing from God, but rather from the multitude, which, thinking itself absolved from all divine sanction, bows only to such laws as it shall have made at its own will. The supernatural truths of faith having been assailed and cast out as though hostile to reason, the ray Author and Redeemer of the human race has been slowly and little by little banished from the universities, the lyceums and gymnasia--in a word, from every public institution."

A century later, in his historic address at Harvard University in 1978, Alexander Solzhenitzyn confirmed Leo XIII's assessment on socialistic thinking. "The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive," the Russian author said. "You can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?"

Nor, nearly thirty years later, is there hope of ideological relief from Britain's other major political parties who remain in lockstep with the Labourites on this issue, leaving their dissenting electorate with nowhere to turn as one Soviet-style directive after another comes down from on high, exalting the foul and punishing the fair.

"What right do politicians have to overturn the traditional definition of marriage-the sacramental union of a man and a woman and the founding block of all societies for thousands of years--as an equality issue?" lamented Catholic writer Piers Paul Read on BBC Newsnight recently. What so-called "right" allows the Christian religious principles of the majority of Brits to be overridden by a miniscule minority, he wanted to know? Well, presumably the same one that prompted a English monarch to start his own religion in 1536.

Alas, it seems that, as Chancellor Gordon Brown (the prime minister-in-waiting and said to be a friend of the Catholic Church) remains utterly silent on this issue, there isn't a St. Thomas More to be found anywhere.

Editor. see News in Brief under Great Britain for the latest development.

Paula Adamick is a professional journalist. She writes from London, England, where she publishes the monthly Canada Post.