BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

UK government rep tells
anti-Pope groups to show
restraint during papal visit



LONDON, July 6 (Reuters) - Campaigners planning to stage demonstrations during Pope Benedict's visit to Britain should show restraint, the prime minister's special representative for the papal visit, Chris Patten, has warned.

Various protests are expected during the first papal state visit to the country in September, including by secularists, gay rights groups and those angry at the child-abuse scandal which has spread throughout the Roman Catholic church globally.

But Patten, a former Conservative minister and governor of Hong Kong, who was appointed by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to help co-ordinate the four-day visit, said demonstrators should be free to express their opinions, but should not fall into the trap of intolerance.

"I hope that (the protests) will be done with restraint, and that it will be done with a show of tolerance," he said.

"It would be an extraordinary irony if those who polemicise past intolerance by churches are to become themselves the proponents of intolerance towards churches."

The trip, from September 16 to 19, will be the first papal visit since Pope John Paul II's pastoral visit in 1982 [and the first papal visit ever to Britain!] and the first state visit by a Pope to Britain.

Pope John Paul's visit was pastoral largely because it coincided with the Falklands war between Britain and Argentina.

Although Britain's child abuse cases were dealt with largely in the late 1990s, followed by sweeping reforms to the Catholic Church's child protection system in England and Wales as well as Scotland, some groups plan to demonstrate against the Church's failure to tackle the issue globally.

British author and atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins has said he will try to have Pope Benedict arrested to face questions over the matter.

Gay activists are planning protests against the church's attitude on homosexuality, while secularists intend to complain at the cost of the visit to the British taxpayer.

On Monday, Patten told reporters the public cost was likely to rise by up to 50 percent to 10-12 million pounds (NZ$22-26m), excluding security, because initial estimates had underestimated the "complexity" of the trip.

The Church's costs are to be more than 7 million pounds (NZ$15.3m).

"It is much more difficult than most, than any, state visit that I can think of, not least because of the amount of exposure the Pope gets to the public," Patten said.

The former European Commissioner admitted Britain's parliamentary election on May 6 had created a planning hiatus, but denied he had inherited a shambles from the outgoing Labour party, as had been suggested in some of the media.

The trip has had its hiccups though, including an apology from the Foreign Office after a civil servant memo was leaked suggesting the Pope open a hospital abortion ward, bless a gay marriage and launch a papal-branded condom during his visit.

"They behaved like offensive idiots," Patten said, referring to the civil servants who have since been disciplined.

Any tensions between the Catholic Church and Church of England, the Anglican mother church, would not be an issue during meetings, Patten, who is Catholic, said, despite the Pope making it easier for disaffected Anglo-Catholics to convert.

The Pope is due to meet the Queen, head of the CoE, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, its spiritual head.

"I don't think these are moments for playing out tensions," Patten said.


This supposed 'problem' has been reported earlier but this is from Jewish news agency...


UK Jews assail timing of
Pope's speech to Parliament


LONDON, July 6 (JTA) -- Pope Benedict XVI has come under fire from Jewish groups in Britain following a report that his address to Parliament will occur on the eve of Yom Kippur.

The Cabinet Office has rejected requests to change the Sept. 17 speech to earlier in the day or to a different day during the Pope's four-day visit to Britain, according to the Jewish Chronicle.

Though the speech at Westminster Hall is scheduled to end before the start of the holy day, Jewish leaders have said it will impinge on preparations for Yom Kippur and will not allow Jewish leaders and lawmakers to eat before the start of the 25-hour fast.

"Yom Kippur begins at sunset on the 17th. All that means is the event in Westminster Hall needs to finish in time for Jewish representatives to return home," a spokesperson for the Conservative government told British media. "That's always been planned for. There's no argument around that. The Church and parliamentary authorities have agreed the timing on the day."

Speaker of the House of Lords Baroness Helen Hayman is among the members of Parliament working to change the date of the speech.


The current membership of the House of Commons is 650, of which 57 are Jewish. Attendance at the Pope's speech is not mandatory. But if some Jewish members are complaining that they will not get to eat before the Yom Kippur fast begins, why don't they have a big meal an hour before the Pope's speech - which will not last an hour! Or they can always choose not to attend. This is all unnecessary quibbling - anything to be displeased about when it concerns Benedict XVI!

When the Pope came to the USA in 2008, he visited the Park East Synagogue in New York City - a specifically Jewish event - a few hours before sundown and the start of Passover, no less. All those hundreds of New York Jews, including children, who attended the event, did not raise a single complaint about the timing. Now 57 out of 650 members expect the schedule of a state event to conform to their convenience???]


Non-Catholics encouraged to take part
in Pope's visit to Britain
By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent

05 Jul 2010


Pope Benedict XVI will make the first-ever state papal visit to Britain in September. As members of the public were invited to see Benedict XVI regardless of their faith, it emerged that he will meet Nick Clegg, who is an atheist, and Harriet Harman, whose Equality Act angered the Church.

The Government is keen to portray the four-day state visit as a historic event that will enhance the country's standing worldwide and to highlight the Pontiff's commitment to social justice, in order to head off criticism over the costs and the child abuse scandal affecting the Vatican. [What nonsense! As if critics are going to swallow that at all. Or that would such reasoning would head off any criticism of the Chruch and the Pope in any way and for whatever reason!

The simple fact is that the previous Labour government, for whatever reasons it had, invited the Pope to make a state visit, and the new government is honoring that invitation. As for costs, which are mostly for security arrangements, the UK government would be spending just as much for any other important world leader visiting Britain as an official guest. Those costs are not going to be any less if they suddenly decided to reclassify the papal visit from a state visit to a mere official visit. The Catholic Church is spending for all the public events 'of religious nature' that the Pope is having - which means everything, except his meeting with the Queen and his address to members of Parliament.]

Lord Patten of Barnes, invited by David Cameron to oversee the planning, said that the significance of the first-ever state visit by a Pope to Britain was greater than the potential costs.

He told a press conference: "Even if we had known of the parlous state of the nation's finances, I'm sure that wouldn't have been a consideration because the importance of this visit makes its own claim upon modest public support."

The last governor of Hong Kong said Britain was not returning to the Middle Ages "or the days when we would have had to find a squirrel for the pot".

He said he himself had never felt "second-class" as a Catholic in Britain but that if anyone has, the Pope's visit will end that feeling.

As the Daily Telegraph disclosed on Saturday, the cost to taxpayers of the event in September is now put at up to £12million, excluding undisclosed security costs, up from £8m.

The Church claims it has now raised about £5m of its initial estimate of £7m for the pastoral parts including open-air masses in Glasgow and London and the beatification of Cardinal Newman at a park in Birmingham.

But the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, insisted that these events are not just for Roman Catholics, even though parishes are organising tickets for the "pilgrim journey".

He said: "These are events to which any person is welcome. All they need to do is contact their local Catholic parish."

It also emerged that the Pope will visit an old people's home - one of the suggestions in the notorious Foreign Office memo that mocked Catholic teaching - and meet political leaders including the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and Labour's acting leader.

The National Secular Society, which opposes the papal visit, estimates that the security costs of the trip will increase the burden on taxpayers tenfold. [He's clewrly not thinking! Security costs are the bulk of public expense for any state or official visit, so they would have been first to be factored in.]

Its president, Terry Sanderson, said: “The NSS is outraged but not surprised by the news that the cost to the taxpayer of the Pope’s visit is spiralling towards £100 million [?????] We predicted this would happen at the very beginning, although the previous Government denied it."

Unfortunately, it's in the interest of the secular media to keep the flames going over the question of the cost to the taxpayer of this visit, knowing that everyone is seriously concerned about public spending these days... Nonetheless, world leaders do not put their travels on hold because of costs. Queen Elizabeth is in the United States these days, and the US government will be spending just as much on her security as it does on high-risk target Benjamin Netanyahu who is also in Washington today, or any other high-profile world leader visiting the United States.