The right reverend Prelate is making my point for me. We are talking about Christians who want to get married and one or other of them has a connection with a particular parish church. If there are 150 weddings, there are still going to be 150 weddings, but in one of them instead of the actual words of marriage being forcefully made by a clergyman of one denomination, they can be made by a clergyman or priest of another denomination, due to the generosity of the Church of England, which recognises that its
place as the national church is the evolution of a whole historic story and that it needs to defend that by showing that generosity.
I say to the right reverend Prelate that what concerns me is that I have been involved in ecumenical movements for a very long time. As an Anglican I closed, forcibly, the last Conservative club in Liverpool that excluded Catholics. When I became a Catholic, I was cut off by relatives who thought that that was unacceptable. Do not let us kid ourselves about the amount of sectarian bigotry that still exists. Our discussions about Brexit have brought it to the surface again. All I am saying to the right reverend Prelate—and I am addressing him very directly as I finish—is that this is the next step in ecumenism. It is not good enough to say, “I am so keen on the past and am entirely in favour of all that but I cannot manage this step”.
In the amendments, we can get around any of the legal problems. There is no difficulty. I have a host of different ways of doing that. They are not here because I wanted this to be absolutely clearly the words of the Church of England as far as I possibly could, but if the right reverend Prelate would like me to make a lot of changes, I am very happy to do so. It would have been nice had we had that conversation before, but my first discussion about this happened this morning. It is an interesting kind of way in which this has been handled. I just say please give the Bill its Second Reading because the time has come and there is no longer anything but mere political and bureaucratic reasons for trying to stop it.