Ticket info for the visit
will be released soon
July 9, 2010
Ticket information about the Pope's visit to the UK should be released soon, says Lord Patten, in charge of organising the trip.
He said there should also be transparency about costs to the taxpayer, as latest figures suggested the four-day trip could reach £12m.
Lord Patten, himself a Roman Catholic, has been in Birmingham visiting Cofton Park where a Mass will be held.
He confirmed the city is the best place in the West Midlands for the visit.
It was thought that Pope Benedict XVI would hold an open-air mass at Coventry airport in September, but he will now be coming to Birmingham.
He will use Cofton Park for the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, who is buried nearby.
Lord Patten said he supports the Church's decision to switch venues.
"Having seen Cofton Park today, having been to where Cardinal Newman is buried just around the corner, and then having gone up to Birmingham Oratory where he lived for so long and wrote so many extraordinary works, I think it's undoubtedly the right decision," he said.
"It won't hold as many people as theoretically you could have got into Coventry Airport, but I think it will be a great experience for those who are able to get tickets for the Mass."
Earlier this week, it was revealed the cost to taxpayers for the visit could rise to £12m - up to £4m higher than previous figures - and does not include policing costs.
The trip will also cost the Catholic church £7m.
UK trip could be Benedict XVI's
most historically significant
By Edward Pentin
ROME, JULY 8, 2010 (Zenit.org).- For all the concerns over protests and security, Benedict XVI’s state visit to Britain could well be one of his most successful and historically significant to date.
The apostolic voyage, which the Holy Father is said to be eagerly looking forward to, begins Thursday, Sept. 16, with a reception given by Queen Elizabeth II at Holyroodhouse Palace in Edinburgh, her official Scottish residence.
Later that day, the Pope travels to Glasgow where he will celebrate an open-air Mass in Bellahouston Park, 175 acres of parkland and ornamental gardens three miles from the city center. A large crowd is expected, since 30% of Glasgow’s population is Catholic and that most of Britain’s Catholics live in the north.
After a full day in Scotland, the Pope will then fly to London in the evening. His first engagement the following morning will be at St. Mary’s College in Twickenham, southwest London.
St. Mary's is one of Britain’s few Catholic universities, reputed to be the oldest in the country and renowned for its teacher training courses. There the Pope will meet with many youngsters from Catholic schools and, according to Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster, will “reflect on the role of the Church in education” and share his vision for learning. He is also scheduled to hold a meeting there with leaders of different faiths.
That evening he has what Archbishop Nichols describes as “three quite remarkable events” lined up in central London. The first is a visit to the Archbishop of Canterbury at the Anglican primate’s official residence, Lambeth Palace.
The second is a keynote speech to the United Kingdom’s political and cultural leaders in Westminster Hall. One of the most important buildings in London, adjoining the Houses of Parliament, it has been used since medieval times as a place for banquets and gatherings. But perhaps most famously it is the place where St. Thomas More, the patron saint of politicians who is greatly admired by Benedict XVI, was tried and condemned to death.
The Pope will then pay a visit to nearby Westminster Abbey, the resting place of British monarchs and other important national figures as well as the traditional place of coronation. There he will join leaders of the country’s other Christian confessions for evening prayer.
And in what promises to be a historic photo-opportunity, both he and the Archbishop of Canterbury will pray together at the tomb of St. Edward the Confessor, the English monarch and patron saint of the Royal Family, who built the first Westminster Abbey.
The following day, Saturday, Sept. 18, he’ll journey to the Catholic Westminster Cathedral, about half a mile from the Abbey, where he is to celebrate Mass and meet the U.K.’s prime minister, deputy Prime Minster, and the leader of the opposition.
A visit to a residential home for the elderly and a prayer vigil in Hyde Park is scheduled in the afternoon and evening.
Then on Sunday, Benedict XVI will fly by helicopter to Cofton Park near Birmingham where he will celebrate the beatification of the Venerable Cardinal John Henry Newman, also a figure he greatly admires. The park is just a short distance away from Cardinal Newman’s burial place in Rednal.
According to Vatican sources, the British government is keen that the Pope address policy issues convergent with the Holy See such as tackling poverty and safeguarding the environment. But Benedict XVI is also likely to bring up some important concerns that tend to be sidelined in British public life such as protection of the unborn, the family and other life issues.
“He will speak about these in a delicate way,” said one official, “and he will probably also do the same with the bishops.” However, he is not expected to directly address Britain’s recent controversial equality legislation as he voiced his concerns earlier this year, and will generally steer away from directly entering into politics.
Although the visit will be a state one, Vatican officials are viewing it primarily in terms of its pastoral significance, and as “very important” for the country as a whole, not only for the Church.
Britain has become one of Europe’s most secular countries -- at least among its media elites -- with a history of anti-Catholic prejudice dating back to the Reformation.
But Vatican officials are not very concerned about planned protests. “They are possible,” said one official, “but the moment he arrives, things change very perceptibly.”
He recalled that similar vociferous demonstrations were planned in Turkey, but everything changed when the Holy Father arrived there in 2006.
Another official sees this as a particular gift of Benedict XVI. ”Every place he’s gone to, the media has been hostile in advance and then absolutely disarmed,” he said. “When people see him up close, they see he’s transparent, that he’s a holy man, and what you see is what you get, even though he’s extraordinarily shy.”
Blessed Newman
The beatification of Cardinal Newman, the 19th-century theologian who is considered by many to have anticipated the Second Vatican Council, could mark a significant step in helping to draw a line under the controversies of the post-conciliar period.
That’s according to the world’s leading Newman scholar, Father Ian Ker. He pointed out that
Paul VI was also keen for Newman to be elevated to the altars because Newman “stood for exactly what the reformers stood for -- those reformers who were in continuity rather than ‘rupture’ with the past and with tradition.”
Father Ker, professor of theology at the University of Oxford, has long battled with some dissenting Catholics who have tried to claim Newman as their own, using the theologian’s famous remark that he would drink “to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards” to justify their own dissent.
But he insists that Newman was
“simply stating the Catholic position, the same as that of St. Thomas Aquinas: that ultimately we have to obey our consciences even if they are erroneous.”
[Something sounds wrong there!]
As Catholics, he said, “we are obliged to try to correct our consciences, but if we fail to and can’t, then we just have to go by the best of our lights. That’s basic teaching.”
[Ker was more informative about the 'conscience' quote in an Oct. 2008 ZENIT interview that I have looked up - in which he said:
As to the oft repeated claim by liberals that Newman thought so-called 'conscientious dissent' from Church teachings was possible because he said he would toast the Pope but his conscience first, the context where that famous remark occurs is Newman's response to Gladstone's claim that the definition of papal infallibility meant that Englsih Catholics could no longer be regarded as loyal subjects since they now had to obey whatever orders the Pope might give them. Newman, for example, would say that a bishop or priest ordered by the Pope to cover up the abuse of a child has the right to refuse to obey such an order. But Newman was only referring to papal orders not papal teachings.
Father Ker would most like to see Newman made a doctor of the Church. “That will be significant because it will indicate to people that he was orthodox, that he is a teacher of the Church,” he said. “Personally, I think he’s the great doctor of the conciliar period in which we’re living, a towering figure.”
Asked if such a step would finally put an end to the false interpretations of the Council, Father Ker said: “I hope so. He did anticipate the Second Vatican Council but in all his anticipation, he was always very careful to keep a moderate balance. He never went over the top.”
Another positive outcome of the beatification, he believes, will be that more ordinary people will begin praying to the great theologian, which could lead to the second miracle required for his canonization.
“Very often what happens, apparently,” said Father Ker, “is that canonization follows quite quickly after beatification, presumably because people then start to pray in earnest [o the new Blessed].”
He should know. It was after Deacon Jack Sullivan saw Father Ker on television appealing to viewers to pray to Newman for a first miracle that Sullivan prayed to the 19th-century theologian for his back to be healed.
That miraculous healing has directly led to the beatification that will take place on Sept. 19.
CARDINAL NEWMAN ON CONSCIENCE
I am so disturbed about Pentin's strange-sounding quotation from Fr. Ker about Newman's remark on conscience that I went back to Cardinal Ratzinger's famous tribute on the first centenary of Newman's death in 1990 that is brief but densely rich in what he tells us about Newman and conscience.
www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19900428_ratzinger-newman...
...For us at that time, Newman's teaching on conscience became an important foundation for theological personalism, which was drawing us all in its sway. Our image of the human being as well as our image of the Church was permeated by this point of departure.
We had experienced the claim of a totalitarian party, which understood itself as the fulfilment of history and which negated the conscience of the individual. One of its leaders had said: "I have no conscience. My conscience is Adolf Hitler". The appalling devastation of humanity that followed was before our eyes.
So it was liberating and essential for us to know that the "we" of the Church does not rest on a cancellation of conscience, but that, exactly the opposite, it can only develop from conscience.
Precisely because Newman interpreted the existence of the human being from conscience, that is, from the relationship between God and the soul, was it clear that this personalism is not individualism, and that being bound by conscience does not mean being free to make random choices - the exact opposite is the case.
It was from Newman that we learned to understand the primacy of the Pope. Freedom of conscience, Newman told us, is not identical with the right "to dispense with conscience, to ignore a Lawgiver and Judge, to be independent of unseen obligations".
Thus, conscience in its true sense is the bedrock of Papal authority; its power comes from revelation that completes natural conscience, which is imperfectly enlightened, and "the championship of the Moral Law and of conscience is its raison d'être".
I certainly need not explicitly mention that this teaching on conscience has become ever more important for me in the continued development of the Church and the world. Ever more I see how it first opens in the context of the biography of the Cardinal, which is only to be understood in connection with the drama of his century and so speaks to us.
Newman had become a convert as a man of conscience; it was his conscience that led him out of the old ties and securities into the world of Catholicism, which was difficult and strange for him. But this way of conscience is everything except a way of self-sufficient subjectivity: it is a way of obedience to objective truth...
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
April 28, 1990
None of that says we should follow our conscience even if it is wrong. Catholics have a duty to develop an informed conscience - informed by the truths of the faith - and not rely on 'erroneous' conscience which is one's own idea of what one ought to do even if it does not conform to the truths of the faith!
To better understand Cardinal Ratzinger's reflections on Newman, one must read Cardinal Newman's letter to the Duke of Norfolk
http://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume2/gladstone/section5.html
which ends with the statement that has so often been misused because it is cited without the context of everything that preceded it:
Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink — to the Pope, if you please — still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.
The voluble Newman had earlier summarized the points he was making about conscience in the letter, thus:
1. First, I am using the word "conscience" in the high sense in which I have already explained it — not as a fancy or an opinion, but as a dutiful obedience to what claims to be a divine voice, speaking within us; and that this is the view properly to be taken of it, I shall not attempt to prove here, but shall assume it as a first principle.
2. Secondly, I observe that conscience is not a judgment upon any speculative truth, any abstract doctrine, but bears immediately on conduct, on something to be done or not done.
"Conscience," says St. Thomas, "is the practical judgment or dictate of reason, by which we judge what hic et nunc [here and now] is to be done as being good, or to be avoided as evil." Hence conscience cannot come into direct collision with the Church's or the Pope's infallibility which is engaged in general propositions, and in the condemnation of particular and given errors.
3. Next, I observe that, conscience being a practical dictate, a collision is possible between it and the Pope's authority only when the Pope legislates, or gives particular orders, and the like. A Pope is not infallible in his laws, nor in his commands, nor in his acts of state, nor in his administration, nor in his public policy.
His fourth point is rather complex, but it is here where he says something of what Pentin quotes from Fr. Ker, but Newman makes it clear he is referring to obeying orders from the Pope, not his teaching, which is the teaching of the Church:
... the broad proposition, that conscience is ever to be obeyed whether it tells truly or erroneously, and that, whether the error is the fault of the person thus erring or not...
If in a particular case it [conscience] is to be taken as a sacred and sovereign monitor, its dictate, in order to prevail against the voice of the Pope, must follow upon serious thought, prayer, and all available means of arriving at a right judgment on the matter in question.
Interestingly, Newman leads into his disquisition on conscience by referring first to Natural Law, quoting Thomas Aquinas:
"The natural law," says St. Thomas, "is an impression of the Divine Light in us, a participation of the eternal law in the rational creature." This law, as apprehended in the minds of individual men, is called "conscience"; and though it may suffer refraction in passing into the intellectual medium of each, it is not therefore so affected as to lose its character of being the Divine Law, but still has, as such, the prerogative of commanding obedience.
On another occasion, he said of conscience:
Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself; but it is a messenger from Him…
This has now gone far afield from an initial post about the UK visit, but in a way the following commentary
www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?entry_id=3098
is related to the above considerations on conscience. The commentary is by James Martin, SJ, editor of the habitually dissident Jesuit magazine America, who goes on at length - replete with typical Jesuitic casuistry - about 'fear of dissent in the Church' taking off from what was elaborately set up to be a supposed off-the-record address by a South African bishop who attacks the Church for instilling fear by discouraging dissent ('Off-the-record, but promptly posted online!) What a hoot from a magazine that has traded all these decades in its open dissent to the Church doctrine as preached by the modern Popes, to espouse instead its ideas about a supposed Vatican-II 'new Church'!
As if the Church had no right to criticize and denounce dissent against the Magisterium and Tradition, and as if the contemporary Church has ever censored any Catholic publication that do not require the Church's formal imprimatur! As if, in fact, all the contemporary dissenters against the Church Magisterium - America and National Catholic reporter and all their ilk who claim to be the only ones acting in the 'spirit-of-Vatican-II' - have not been free all this time to say the most outrageous things against the true Church and the Pope!
Can we have some down-to-earth honesty at least, Fr. Martin, instead of your usual mealy-mouthed sanctimony?
BTW, Father Z also goes on at length to criticize Bishop Dowling's denunciation of what he calls Benedict XVI's 'restorationism', claiming that Bishop Slattery wearing the cappa magna for the Wachington Mass to celebrate B16's anniversary last April was an example of out-of-place triumphalism!. To which Fr. Z says, "What about the miter and ring and pectoral cross that you wear as a bishop? Are they also examples of triumphalism?"
Dissent against the doctrine and practices of the faith is such a slippery slope heading straight to error, but I suppose dissent - strident, constant dissent - makes the dissenter feel heroic, presuming himself to be morally and intellectually superior, especially if he's standing up to a 2000-year-old institution. So it becomes an addiction dissenters can't get enough of, they come to be dependent on the 'high' it gives them. That's the overwhelming sense I get whenever I happen to read any of the posturings by the dissenters in America and NCReporter.
Sorry, but I saw another news report today that shows what the liberal establishment does to persecute Catholics who simply profess their faith - and it happened right in the good ol' USA, 'land of the free and home of the brave"!
www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-uofill-instructor,0,72035...
Can you read, Father Martin? Has anything comparable ever happened to any of your breed of dissenters?
In effect, a professor of Catholicism was fired from the University of Illinois because some of his students claimed he was engaging in 'hate speech' when he wrote in an e-mail to students an explanation for why the Church opposes homosexual acts: "Natural Moral Law says that morality must be a response to REALITY. In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same." In what way can that statement of fact, based on natural moral law, be construed at all as 'hate speech'???? On the other hand, the act of firing him - for stating a fact that he has every right to say as a teacher of Introduction to Catholicism - is in itself the worst of all hate crimes, punishing someone cruelly for simply stating what he believes in a completely non-hostile way!... I tell you, anti-Church bigots can be the most ubiquitous occasions of sin for a Catholic!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/07/2010 01:20]