There's a strange scarcity of new stories online today from the UK media on the visit - not even any reviews so far that I expected the MSM would use to amplify the negative message of last night's anti-B16 TV programs in the UK. The lull before the storm, certainly. But here's a good message to start the day...
UK Prime Minister offers
a 'very warm welcome'
to Pope Benedict XVI
Sept. 14, 2010
Prime Minister David Cameron has offered Pope Benedict XVI a “very warm welcome” to Britain ahead of his “incredibly important and historic visit”.
Pope Benedict XVI starts his four-day official visit to the UK on Thursday 16 September. This is the first ever official Papal visit to the UK.
The Pope will be visiting Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Birmingham.
The PM said:
This is the first ever Official Papal Visit to these shores. And it’s a great honour for our country.
These will be a very special four days not just for our six million Catholics but for many people of faith right across Britain, and millions more watching around the world...
That's only the start of the message which is on a 2-minute video, and which, for the record, a full transcript will be available.
www.number10.gov.uk/news/topstorynews/2010/09/pm-offers-a-very-warm-welcome-to-pope-benedict-x...
Pope Benedict XVI will visit the UK as Head of State of the Vatican and as the leader of a major denomination.
The full itinerary for the visit is available on the Cabinet Office website and there will be live coverage on the Papal visit website throughout the four days.
Meanwhile, stories like the next ones surely warm the heart cockles of the Pope's detractors, but on the other hand since they have set such low expectations, will they acknowledge any better outcome???
Despite Mass tickets going begging,
Catholic Church says there is
high anticipation for Pope visit
Sept. 14, 2010
The Pope will arrive in the UK for his four-day trip on Thursday, and tThe leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has brushed off any concerns that there is a lack of enthusiasm for the Pope's visit.
Archbishop Vincent Nichols said he was sure "Catholics are looking forward to this visit very much indeed".
The archbishop's comments came after it was revealed that thousands of tickets remain unsold for events during the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the UK.
The Pope's four-day stay will see him attend events in Scotland and England.
The largest organised event is an open-air Mass at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow on the opening day of Pope Benedict XVI's trip to the UK.
The capacity has been reduced to 80,000 after a slow take-up of tickets.
Dioceses in England and Wales have also reported thousands of unfilled places for a London vigil, and the service to beatify Cardinal Newman in Birmingham.
The archbishop added: "The Catholic tradition in this country is one of actually very profound loyalty to the person of the Holy Father.
"While many would want to suggest differences of trends and opinion, this way or not, I'm quite sure - and it is my experience at parish after parish, and standing at the back of Westminster Abbey day after day - that Catholics are looking forward to this visit very much indeed.
"And the Catholic people of this country know what it is to show their affection and support for Pope Benedict."
Jack Valero, who is co-ordinating the beatification of 19th Century English cardinal John Henry Newman in Cofton Park on Sunday, said: "It is still not as many as expected, although it's pretty full."
Archbishop Nichols said he expected 54,000 to 55,000 people to attend the 60,000-capacity event, which requires a "pilgrim pack" costing up to £25 for entry.
The London vigil takes place in Hyde Park on Saturday.
BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott says the relatively slow uptake of passes for the big events
appears to indicate less enthusiasm among Catholics to see Pope Benedict than they showed for his charismatic predecessor John Paul II 28 years ago. [Maybe it has more to do with objecting to paying a few and/or having to deal with the time and effort associated with the stringent security measures in place! Though these objections are hard to understand for a Filipino Catholic like me who grew up with the traditional Catholic idea to consider the Pope above all as Christ's Vicar on earth - that is why 5 million Filipinos turned up for John Paul II at the concluding Mass of the 1995 World Youth Day in Manila, the largest single crowd ever assembled for a Pope.
But aren't the organizers just giving up unnecessarily on the expected Mass attendances? Surely they could easily distribute any unsold or returned tickets for free to various religious institutions like nuns' orders and charitable homes!... If it's any consolation at all, the two public Masses on Pope Benedict's program in the US both had crowds much less than the low-end estimate of the UK attendance because they were limited to the capacity of the baseball stadiums where they were held... Still, Cardinal Newman's beatification Mass should have been at least on the order of Fray Galvao's 800,000-1 million crowd in Sao Paolo...]
Pope Benedict's visit has already sparked controversy over its cost and relevance.
The cost of policing the trip will be up to £1.5m, the Association of Chief Police Officers has estimated.
A BBC poll ahead of the Pope's arrival found almost six-in-10 British Catholics asked said their faith was not "generally valued" in British society, but 70% expected the visit to help the Catholic Church in the UK.
The Pontiff will go to Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Birmingham on the first visit by a Pope to the UK since John Paul II in 1982.
The following article is hardly much better...
British Catholics are 'anxious'
about the Pope's visit
but no longer outsiders
by Stephen Bates
13 September 2010
It is almost impossible to conceive the change in the position of Roman Catholicism in England over the past 50 years. In the 1960s, when I was serving as an altar boy at mass, to be a Catholic was to be an outsider, a group outside the mainstream of British life, separate, slightly alien.
As if to emphasise the distinctness, our parish church was weirdly out of keeping with the rest of our suburban town: an enormous, garish, red-brick Italianate structure complete with campanile and a large statue of Christ on the roof.
On feast days we processed around the grounds behind a plaster Virgin Mary, praying fervently for the conversion of England as we went. My Anglican father was one of those we described as our separated brethren.
There were no British Catholic role models, so when John F Kennedy – young, personable, dynamic and Catholic – became president of the United States, we were ecstatic. He was one of our own. Ironically, at the very moment we were celebrating, Kennedy himself was assuring American Protestant clergy that he would not take his political orders from the Vatican.
How different today. This week's
Tablet newspaper has a list of 100 influential Catholics, ranging from the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, to the BBC's Mark Thompson and Mark Damazer; from Delia Smith and Danny Boyle to David Lodge, Peter Ackroyd and Hilary Mantel; from Chris Patten and Iain Duncan Smith to Mark Serwotka and Jack Dromey; not to mention Frank Skinner, Peter Kay, Adrian Chiles, Susan Boyle and Ant and Dec. Not necessarily religious role models or holy folk, but certainly diverse.
Not so long ago, when Duncan Smith and Charles Kennedy led their parties and Tony Blair was Prime Minister, all three were Catholics, or on the way to converting, an event which passed without comment or censure in a way that would have been unthinkable even 30 years ago.
Catholics, less than 10% of the population, are at the heart of every establishment. And yet, as the Pope prepares to fly to Britain on Thursday, the anticipation is muted and fearful rather than excited.
"I just hope it goes off peacefully, and he gets away again without too much fuss," said one Catholic editor.
This contrasts sharply with the enthusiasm that greeted Benedict's much more charismatic and vigorous predecessor, John Paul II, in 1982 and the huge crowds that attended his appearances. This time, parishes have complained about the lack of organisation and have been sending back their allocated tickets.
Young Catholics may be more enthusiastic. Danny Curtin, helping to organise youth attendances at next week's events, said:
"There's genuine enthusiasm to see the Pope, not necessarily the man but what he represents. The 3,000 young people who will greet him do not have issues or problems with their faith. The sex abuse issue just does not come up – they know that safeguards have been put in place in the church to protect them over the last few years."
The Church here has changed in the last 28 years. While Catholics have become more pronounced – and less remarked upon – in public life, mass attendances have been in decline or static in recent decades. Then, about 2 million of Britain's 5 million Catholics attended weekly mass; now the figure is less than 1 million. Immigration has disguised the drop in some areas. Filipino nurses mingle with Polish plumbers, Nigerians and occasional Anglican converts to boost congregations.
The newcomers tend to be more fervent and more conservative than the locals, long used to quietly ignoring Vatican injunctions they do not agree with, a process that got under way with the 1968 Vatican encyclical
Humanae Vitae, prohibiting artificial forms of contraception.
Some Vatican injunctions seem perverse: many of us knew good Catholic priests cast into outer darkness when they wanted to get married, while the Church welcomed married Anglican priests into its clergy. [That's a simplistic reduction of a complex situation in both cases. And priests who wanted to get married did get married but were not 'cast into outer darkness' - they just weren't priests anymore.] The idea of women priests remains anathema in a priesthood compromised by a tiny minority of sex abusers,
a crisis the old men in the Vatican seem clueless about containing. [And this is a deliberate, almost unforgivable, refusal to acknowledge what the Church has done about the problem - pretty much contained everywhere now, since the news in the past several months has not brought up any cases of recent abuse. Also, a thoughtless remark about 'old men' in the Vatican, considering that the oldest man in question is Benedict XVI, who has looked into the issue much earlier, farther and deeper than anyone in the Church, or in the world, for that matter.]
The current Pope's tendency to lecture church members without deviation or hesitation but plenty of repetition [It is his duty, as Pope and as a Christian, to insist upon Church teaching, and if that is lecturing, so be it!], and his effortless ability to antagonise Muslims, Anglicans and Jews with careless phrases, may not re-enthuse the lapsed. [I am starting to actively detest this Bates!]
We have the ironic prospect of the head of one of the world's most autocratic institutions addressing the Mother of Parliaments. [Isn't it surprising that a Catholic intellectual - he's an opinion writer, after all - misses the point that a religion is necessarily 'autocratic' because a true religion also implies discipline? Look at the disarray in the Church of England which has decided literally to put its faith to a vote! And, BTW, the Pope is not addressing the Mother of Parliaments on this visit. Parliamentarians are invited to his address at Westminster Hall, but they will be there as part of the UK's civilian society.]
That he will do so in fluent but heavily accented German English, just as Britain has been awash with Second World War commemorations, calls for extra sensitivity if he is not to stir up latent but deep-seated anti-Catholic passions.
John Wilkins, a former editor of the
Tablet, said:
"Can the Pope succeed in talking to the hearts of the people? He lectured the bishops in Rome recently on the dangers of dissent but he is coming to a country with a strong tradition of dissent. It is a very honourable tradition here and he needs to recognise that. We know he is not like John Paul II – he's a man of the library. The question is, can he succeed in the market place of British opinion?" [Every time the Pope says something that the liberals dislike, they say he is 'lecturing'! This whole comment is so biased, arrogant and supercilious - you'd think Benedict XVI was naive and would come to the UK unprepared and completely ignorant of its history and culture!]
One of the world's most sanctimonious do-good organizations, Amnesty International, has issued a statement condemning the Pope for 'failing to protect children' and this 'violating human rights', yada yada, while calling on the Catholic church to join them in their worldwide campaign for abortion!
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=18990
Protect the Pope says the man who founded AI is a British Catholic!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/09/2010 18:38]