‘They only hate me because I’m a Catholic,’says Princess Michael

BY DAVID V BARRETT
THERE IS STILL an anti-Catholic bias in Britain, according to Princess Michael of Kent, who claimed this week that this is one of the reasons she has met hostility from the British public and in the media.
Her Catholicism was a problem when she married into the Royal family in 1978. Pressure was put on her at the time, she said, particularly by Lord Mountbatten, to convert to Anglicanism. She said there were even hints that she and her husband would be rewarded with a place on the Civil List if she converted. But she was not prepared to do so.
“To be asked to convert, to see the light, hallelujah, you know, I just can’t do that,” she told John Stapleton on ITV’s My Favourite Hymns last Sunday. “I’m many things, but I’m not a hypocrite.” Princess Michael was primarily responding to reports that she had made racist remarks in a New York restaurant in May, which she denied. The Czech-born princess, originally Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, is the daughter of an Austrian father.
“I’m foreign, which is never quite accepted, I think. I have different ways of saying things and doing things and I’m halfHungarian which implies I am volatile. Not really — I think I’m rather high-spirited. I’m also very tall. When I came into the family I was very much the tallest lady. Thank God, Diana came and was tall with me.” Prince Michael of Kent lost his right of succession to the throne when he married Princess Michael. Their marriage was doubly controversial because her previous marriage had been annulled. According to the Act of Settlement of 1701, no Catholic can accede to the throne and nobody in line can remain in succession if he or she becomes or marries a Catholic.
Their nephew Lord Nicholas Windsor, the younger son of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, forfeited his 25th place in line to the throne when he converted to Catholicism in 2002. His brother George, Earl of St Andrews, was also ruled out of the line of succession when he married Silvana Tomaselli, a Canadian academic who is a Catholic, in 1988.
The Duchess of Kent herself became a Catholic in 1994. The Act of Settlement prevents monarchs or heirs to the throne from marrying Catholics, but their spouses are not prevented from converting to Catholicism after their marriages.
There have been a number of challenges to the Act of Settlement, on the grounds that it discriminates specifically against Catholics. There is no restriction on the monarch or any person in line to the throne marrying a member of any other religion. The Guardian newspaper lost a legal challenge against the Act, based on humans rights legislation.