An Historic Event

LARGE CROWDS are expected to gather along the streets of London and Edinburgh to see Benedict XVI pass by in his trademark ‘popemobile’.



 The itinerary for his 16-19 September trip combines visually and symbolically spectacular religious and state events. The Pope is to fly into Scotland to meet the Queen at the Palace of Holyrood House in Edinburgh: their meeting will be the first time a ruling British monarch has welcomed the Holy Father to the UK as a fellow head-of-state since the reign of Henry VIII.



 The Pope is also set to make a speech at Westminster Hall in London – a significant event for the UK’s 4million Catholics, as the venue is where the Catholic martyrs Ss Thomas More and Edmund Campion were tried and sentenced to death in the 16th century.



 Prime Minister David Cameron is expected to host a state banquet in Benedict XVI’s honour at Lancaster House. The Pope is also due to meet the head of the global Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, at London’s Lambeth Palace, and pray with other church leaders at Westminster Abbey.



 Pope Benedict is due to preside at three big open-air events. As well as a prayer service in London’s Hyde Park, more than half of the 185,000 Mass-going Catholics in Scotland are to be allocated places at a Mass in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park.





Newman beatification





 The centre-piece of the trip will, however, be the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman – England’s most famous Anglican convert to Catholicism – during a 19 September Mass at Cofton Park in Birmingham.



 That Benedict XVI is to oversee the beatification himself demonstrates the esteem with which he holds the man who founded the Oxford Movement to bring the Anglican Church back to its Catholic roots.



 Converting to Catholicism at the age of 44, he was later made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII, before dying in Birmingham in 1890, aged 89. Under rules devised by Pope Benedict himself, beatification is normally performed by a cardinal in the diocese where the candidate for sainthood died. But in March, the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, president of the Catholics Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, said the beatification – an important step towards sainthood – would be overseen by the Pope himself.



 “Pope Benedict has a particular attentiveness to the writings of Cardinal Newman,” said Archbishop Nichols. “He is making an exception to his own rules to do this.”





Papal comparisons





 The visit is expected to be a lower key affair than that of Benedict XVI’s predecessor in 1982. Pope John Paul II was widely travelled and magnetised crowds with his charisma and fortitude, whereas his successor is quieter and more scholarly by comparison.



 John Paul II was two decades younger than his successor when he visited the UK, and was there for 6 days, rather than 4, so he was able to encompass much more during his visit. Also, as his was a pastoral rather than a state visit, the trip was less governed by diplomatic protocol as the schedule could be dictated to a greater extent by its religious organisers. Consequently, the Pope will not be visiting Wales, as his predecessor did in 1982, although he is set to meet a Welsh delegation after Mass at Westminster to bless a mosaic of the Welsh patron saint, David (500-589).



 Alex des Forges, of the English and Welsh Bishops’ conference organising committee, said that while not being on the same scale as John Paul II’s major set-piece events, the number of pilgrims at the central events would probably number in the hundreds of thousands.



 “We’re encouraging people to come out and see the Pope,” said Mr des Forges. “And we’re also using new technology and social media to allow those that can’t attend those events to share in the visit.”



 The whole trip is to be live-streamed from its official website (http://www.thepapalvisit.org.uk/), meaning people who cannot attend the main events will be able to follow the Pope and his proclamations.





Church difficulties





 For many British Catholics in the UK, the visit is being seen as a chance to celebrate the strengths of the faith rather than dwell on recent problems over dwindling Mass attendance, fewer vocations and clerical sex abuse. The Pope has been criticised for not doing enough to crack down on the problem of paedophile priests earlier, and it remained unclear at the time of writing whether he would meet sex-abuse victims during his UK visit.



 Journalist James Roberts said that, as a Catholic convert, he was very keen that the trip should be evangelical in nature, like that of John Paul II.



 “There was much more enthusiasm in 1982, generated by the Church through the bishops and passed onto parishioners by their priests,” said Mr Roberts. That enthusiasm, he said, seemed to be lacking in the bishops’ conference this time, adding that there had been relatively little publicity about the visit.



 “There’s a feeling in the UK Church that evangelisation gets in the way of ecumenism, but I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. No-one has got a grip on the visit yet and there have definitely been problems with the organisation.”





Personal note





 One man who knows the importance of good organisation is this journalist’s father, David Hirst, who was the accountant for the Papal visit to Wales in 1982, when the Polish Pope celebrated an open-air Mass with a congregation of 150,000 at Cardiff’s Pontcanna Fields.



 “I became involved with the last papal visit nine months before it happened, and it was clear we needed more time,” he remembered. “It is worrying that venues for Pope Benedict’s visit were not confirmed three months before he was due to arrive.”



 For my Dad, the biggest success of John Paul II’s visit was a dramatic rise in Church attendance across the UK, which he put down to strong attendance at high calibre liturgies.



 “The trip raised the profile of the Church, showing it as an important entity, and one of its strengths was the high quality of the liturgical services and the homilies,” he said. “It is crucial that there are good crowds and that the public events are well-organised.”





Austerity measures





 The trip, which was originally estimated to cost around £15m, comes as austerity measures are being implemented across a continent still reeling from the global financial crisis. As it is a state visit, protocol dictates that the UK government will foot the bill for the non-religious elements of the trip, and in July it said its share of the costs were likely to be up to £4m higher than originally estimated. This irked secularist groups who say taxpayers’ money should not be used to fund the visit of a religious leader.



 There were also concerns over the payment of the Church’s share of the cost – thought to exceed £7m. In May, churchgoers were urged to give generously at the Pentecostal offertory collection to help foot the bill, amid reports the visit might have to be scaled back if the Church could not raise more funds. More fund-raising drives are expected as the Pope’s visit approaches.





Organisational costs





 Concerns about cost and logistics meant there were even question-marks over Cardinal Newman’s beatification ceremony. The Mass was originally planned to take place at Coventry airport, where hundreds of thousands had turned out to see John Paul II in 1982. Critics said the smaller venue at Cofton Park was chosen due to cost concerns, but in July Archbishop Nichols denied this. He said more stringent modern rules over health, safety and security meant the airport would not have been able to cope with the sort of crowds who flocked to see the Polish Pope.



 “Moreover,” the Archbishop added, “Cofton Park is very close to the place where Cardinal Newman lived during his summer months – it’s a park around which he walked. It puts the ceremony of his beatification right in the context of his life.”



 In another blow to the trip’s organisation, Archbishop Faustino Sainz Muñoz, the papal nuncio to Britain who had been involved in the planning process, was taken to a hospital in Spain earlier this year after suffering a stroke.



 Meanwhile, domestic British politics threatened to overshadow the visit – which comes months after the Labour Party were defeated in national elections for the first time since 1997 – with critics saying lawmakers were trying to exploit the trip to score political points.



 Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown upset Vatican officials by breaking protocol and announcing the visit following a meeting with Pope Benedict in February 2009.





Settling Church feathers





 To make matters worse, the Foreign Office team involved with planning the visit made a major gaffe earlier this year by circulating a mock memo suggesting the Pope could launch a range of condoms during his stay, or visit an abortion clinic.



 The Foreign Office quickly apologised for the “naïve and disrespectful views”. The UK’s ambassador to the Vatican, Francis Campbell, met senior Vatican officials to express regret on behalf of the government, and the apology was accepted, with Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi saying the incident would have “absolutely no impact” on the Pope’s visit.



 But it was clear the UK had some making up to do. Shortly after the gaffe, it was announced that Lord Patten of Barnes – a former Governor of Hong Kong and European Commissioner, who is now Chancellor of Oxford University – would be the Prime Minister’s personal representative for the visit, in charge of the government’s planning team.



 The Catholic Bishops of England and Wales warmly welcomed the appointment. It is hoped the veteran diplomat will be able to both settle Church feathers ruffled by the diplomatic faux-pas, while helping ensure the trip is organised well enough to allow it to be the resounding success for which so many British Catholics are longing.