Planning, protocol and pluralism:
UK envoy to the Vatican prepares
for the papal visit
By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY,aUG. 17 (CNS) -- The life of an ambassador to the Vatican is filled with meetings, liturgies, conferences, reports and social events.
About a dozen members of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Vatican seem to be everywhere -- at every papal event, every big conference and even at the lectures of guest speakers at pontifical universities.
Francis Campbell, the British ambassador to the Vatican, is one member of the group of diplomats who seem to spend every afternoon and evening running from a meeting to a conference and then on to a reception or dinner party.
Somehow, despite the busyness, he and at least one other member of the diplomatic corps find time to plan fairly elaborate practical jokes to play on their colleagues and on journalists.
But for the past year, he has had what he described as being almost another full-time job: preparing for Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Great Britain Sept. 16-19.
At its most basic level, the job of an ambassador is to explain his home government to his host government and explain his host government to his own bosses.
Obviously, the people who read his regular reports to London know what the Vatican is, who the Pope is and what the main issues of mutual concern are.
But a lot more people from various sectors of government and civil society are involved in a papal visit -- in setting the schedule, inviting the guests and organizing security -- and it's the ambassador's job to make sure all of them are up to speed on the relationship between the British government and the Vatican.
The previous time Great Britain hosted a papal visit was 1982 when Pope John Paul II made the trip.
No one who is now in the British Embassy to the Holy See was working there at the time, but there are files of information about the visit 28 years ago.
"This time around it's a very different visit for a number of reasons," particularly because the 2010 visit is a state visit as well as a pastoral one, Campbell said.
Pope John Paul did meet Queen Elizabeth II and various government leaders in 1982, but the whole atmosphere was restrained because the United Kingdom and Argentina were at war over the Falkland Islands and the Vatican was treading carefully.
The first appointment on Pope Benedict's calendar on Sept. 16 is a meeting with the Queen at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, followed by a reception with 450 people, he said.
"The Queen will introduce the Pope to about 120 people representing different walks of life," he said.
Campbell said he expects the event will attract a lot of attention in Great Britain, but he also thinks the Pope could make a big impact when he speaks Sept. 17 in London's historic Westminster Hall, a building completed in 1099 and once used for coronation festivities and as a venue for courts of law. In fact, St. Thomas More was condemned to death at Westminster Hall in 1535.
Leaders of British civil society, including artists, politicians, scholars and business officials, will attend the Pope's speech in Westminster Hall.
Campbell said the fact that the Pope was invited to speak in the same place where Thomas More was condemned -- for not siding with King Henry VIII in his debate with the Roman Catholic Church at a time of extreme church-state tensions -- "symbolizes a rapprochement" between British society and the papacy.
"It also says something about where we are as a country, the extent of religious pluralism and of tolerance and acceptance of people of other faiths and other denominations," said Campbell, the first Catholic to serve at British ambassador to the Vatican since the Reformation.
Campbell said that while many people in Italy, including at the Vatican, describe Great Britain as "very secular," 70 percent of the population identifies itself as Christian and the churches are very active in public debates.
[But church attendance is very deficient and steadily declining!]
Britain, he said, "is not a society that is apathetic about religion," and that can be seen in the media coverage in the run-up to the Pope's visit"
[But Britain's secular society is worse than apathetic to religion - it is militantly hostile, atl east thoese elements who are regularly given wide play in the media!]
"Some people would say, 'Well, do you prefer indifference or antagonism?' and I think I would prefer antagonism because it means you're relevant," he said.
[Or as Cardinal Ruini puts it, 'Better attacked than irrelevant!' - which is, of course, a valid way of looking at it, i.e., the militant hostility as an indication of fear of religion and its influence, as much as their scorn.]
In late August, Campbell's role in the planning process transformed into service as a consultant on the speeches government officials will make to the Pope, on finalizing the guest list for government-hosted events and on organizing a working dinner for Vatican officials, British government representatives and leaders of other Christian churches and religious groups.
People who do not understand why Great Britain continues to have diplomatic relations with the Vatican haven't taken the time to see how many issues of concern to Great Britain are also issues of concern to the Vatican, including international development and showing solidarity with the poor, particularly by providing education and health care, he said.
The working dinner, which the Pope will not attend, will cover "themes that are of importance in the state-to-state relationship between the U.K. and the Holy See. Those include climate change, disarmament, ethics in the economy, levels of international development spending, interfaith dialogue (and) ecumenism," he said.
Campbell will complete a five-year term at the Vatican in December "and to finish with a visit is something fantastic, but it's like a completely different full-time job," he said.
Damian Thompson disputes the Campbell-Ruini attitude to militant antagonism against the Catholic Church, and offers some nuanced insights, but also persists in dissing the Church's organization of the papal visit:
Is the British ambassador right
about antagonism to the Church?
August 27, 2010
Francis Campbell, Britain’s charming and thoughtful Ambassador to the Holy See, has given an interview to the US Catholic News Service about the Pope’s visit in which he says: “The British press is not indifferent to the visit of the Pope. Some people would say: ‘Do you prefer indifference or antagonism?’ I think I would prefer antagonism, because it means you’re relevant.”
Is he right? I think it depends what you mean by “antagonism”. Old-fashioned Protestant antagonism to the Pope, of the sort supplied by Pastor Jack Glass when John Paul II visited in 1982, is oddly reassuring: if fundamentalists regard Rome as the Whore of Babylon then, repugnant as that view may be, it’s evidence that the papacy still has the power to disturb Christians who (from an orthodox Catholic perspective) adhere to a truncated and brutalised version of the faith.
Also, I can’t get too worried about Professor Richard Dawkins, who despite his secular views is essentially the successor to Pastor Glass (though he lacks his intellectual subtlety). If Dawkins’s followers hate the Pope for being the Pope, that’s their problem. Their Pythonesque plans to arrest the Holy Father are more likely to draw a smile from the British public than to provoke modern-day Gordon Riots.
But it’s media antagonism that Campbell is talking about.
Here we need make a distinction between columnists ranting about the evils of religion and Catholicism – it’s a free country – and journalists telling lies about the Pope’s supposed complicity in abuse cases or otherwise manipulating the suffering of victims to torpedo the visit.
We’ll know soon enough if certain media outlets have decided to go ahead with their planned dirty tricks. If those tricks work, “antagonism” could lead to a disaster. If they don’t, for one reason or another, then the papal visit could be an unexpected triumph.
Indifference is still a threat, though. Catholic indifference, that is.
The Bishops of England and Wales made no attempt to sell Benedict XVI to the faithful until they had this visit sprung on them: most Mass-going Catholics don’t have a clue why this pontificate matters because its reforms and initiatives are ignored by their pastors.
Meanwhile, Eccleston Square has not only done its best to arrange thoroughly un-Benedictine liturgies for the Pope’s visit, but it has also made such a hash of organising the open-air events that most Catholics don’t seem particularly interested in attending them.
If Catholics can’t be bothered to turn out in large numbers to greet the Successor of Peter, that will damage the reputation of the Church in England and Wales far more effectively than the campaigning of militant secularists. Yet it could so easily come to pass.
The Birmingham beatification is expensive to attend, difficult to get to and threatens to trap “pilgrims” in mind-numbing queues. The Hyde Park prayer vigil, meanwhile, promises to be an aesthetic and musical fiasco. Whether it can be turned around in time I don’t know – but, at the very least, the Vatican should demand that the “pilgrim packs” include ear plugs.
(Glasgow is a different kettle of fish: apparently
the Scottish bishops have persuaded the Pope to attend a performance by Susan Boyle, so that should bring him into contact with plenty of the faithful.)
[That's not how I understood the news reports at all. I cannot imagine that the Pope will arrive during the pre-Mass warm-up just to listen to Ms Boyle. Perhaps, instead of letting her just do the warm-up and singing in the Choir, they might have arranged for her to sing Panis angelicus or something equally appropriate, as Placido Domingo has done during Communion for papal Masses under both John Paul II adn Benedict XVI.]
Three weeks to go. That’s a scary thought. Perhaps it’s time for the Church to play the old politician’s trick of lowering expectations.
And that's about as gloomy and disheartening a prediction as one can make about the visit. Should not Thompson and other Catholic writers seek instead to accentuate the positive in the little time left until the event is on us?
Here however is a more substantial criticism of the UK bishops who, from all accounts, have pretty much followed a 'laissez faire' laxity, failing to demand that the faithful remain faithful to their faith - isn't that their duty, after all? Not bending over backwards and being too politically correct with respect to their own religion!
English bishops must reject
homosexualist agenda or
lose ground on life issues
By Hilary White
LONDON, August 24, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – John Smeaton, the head of the UK’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and one of the most prominent pro-life advocates in the world, has called for the Catholic bishops of Britain to cut their ties with Catholic groups that promote homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle.
But there is little hope of that, says one prominent Catholic campaigner, while the archdiocese of Westminster, Britain’s leading Catholic see, continues to host bi-monthly public celebrations of homosexuality.
“It’s high time,” Smeaton wrote, “the Catholic bishops of England and Wales defended the culture of life by cutting their ties with pro-homosexual ‘rights’ campaigning Catholics.” Smeaton said that there can be no separation of issues for Catholic leaders, that even tacit support for the homosexualist agenda creates moral confusion among the public.
He was referring to an article that appeared in the
Guardian newspaper by homosexualist activist Martin Prendergast who said that the loss of Catholic adoption agencies to pro-homosexualist legislation is “a victory for vulnerable children.”
Prendergast is the force behind the infamous Soho Masses Pastoral Council that hosts Masses and other events promoting the homosexualist ideology within the Catholic Church.
The group was publicly accepted by the archdiocese in 2007, under Cormac Murphy O’Connor, then Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. They were allowed to hold their Masses at the Church of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, London; this situation has continued under the new archbishop, Vincent Nichols.
Daphne McLeod, the head of the Catholic campaign group Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, told LifeSiteNews.com that the situation has not improved under Nichols. The Soho Mass group, she said, is “getting worse, more brazen. They’re spreading and have groups now to attract the young people.”
McLeod has organized prayer vigils outside the church where the homosexualist events are held. “I see these nice young people go in there and I’m sure they don’t know how wrong it is. They’re not being taught about it in Catholic schools.”
McLeod’s organization has written to and visited Vatican officials begging that the situation be addressed. “We write to Rome all the time, we went to Rome, with all those dossiers and nothing was done. We spoke to Cardinal [Francis] Arinze [then-head of the Vatican’s Congregation of Divine Worship and Sacraments] and he said, ‘I’m not going to do anything about the Soho Masses.’”
However, there can be little doubt that the ideological orientation of the Soho Masses is opposed to “the Vatican.” A homily from the most recent celebration, by the former head of the Dominican order and frequent celebrator, Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, openly criticized “the Vatican” for maintaining and promoting the Church’s perennial teaching on sexuality.
“[T]his is a tough time to be a Catholic,” Radcliffe said. “The Church … is largely ruled by old men, even older than me, who seem out of touch with the world. Every statement that comes from the Vatican seems to provoke more misunderstanding, more embarrassment, more frustration.”
McLeod said she has spoken several times to Archbishop Nichols who, she said, “is no help at all.”
The archbishop maintains that the Masses are only for the pastoral help of homosexuals who adhere to the Church’s teaching on chastity.
“But these people don’t even pretend to be chaste. At least they’re honest,” McLeod said. “[Nichols] tries to pretend they are, but he really must know they’re not.”
In one conversation, McLeod said, Archbishop Nichols gave away what she believes to be the driving interest of the Catholic bishops in their tacit support of the homosexualist movement’s agenda.
“They’ve been brainwashed into believing that is the only way to go. Nichols has said this to me,
‘We must have unity at all price. If I speak out against it, there’ll be disunity among the bishops, and we can’t have that’.”
But she said this is to place unity above the truth. “Unity is their great graven idol. I can’t judge their hearts, but I wonder what they’re thinking.”
She said that the only solution she sees now is prayer and support for a new generation of good young priests who support the Church’s teaching. “The Lord has a solution, and the good young priests are probably that. They’re beginning to get parishes.”
Smeaton, paraphrasing Pope John Paul II, said, “It is an illusion to think that we can build a true culture of human life if we do not offer adolescents and young adults an authentic education in sexuality, and in love, and the whole of life according to their true meaning and in their close interconnection.”
SPUC has campaigned heavily against the support of the Catholic Church, including by Archbishop Nichols, for the government’s strongly pro-abortion and pro-homosexual sex education programs.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/08/2010 23:33]