BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

UK prepares highest level
of welcome for the Pope:
Interview with Mons. Summersgill
By Genevieve Pollock


LONDON, JULY 21, 2010 (Zenit.org).- As the United Kingdom prepares the highest level of welcome for Benedict XVI, the anticipation is growing, and Catholics are becoming increasingly aware of the Church's place in society.

ZENIT interviewed Monsignor Andrew Summersgill, coordinator for the Sept. 16-19 Papal visit to the United Kingdom, about the preparations and the climate in that region.

In this interview, Monsignor Summersgill explained the significance of the invitation to the Pope by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and he described some of the ways in which Catholics are being prepared for the visit of the Holy Father.

What is the latest news in the preparations as you continue concretizing the details for Benedict XVI's visit?
Well, I am sure that you will have seen that on July 2, the Holy See, the British government and the bishops' conferences of England and Wales and Scotland confirmed the main elements of the Holy Father's visit here in September. The detailed program will be published about a month before Pope Benedict arrives.

At the moment we are engaged in sending allocations of places to dioceses for attendance at the larger gatherings with the Holy Father: the Mass in Glasgow, the Mass of beatification [of Cardinal John Henry Newman] in Birmingham and the vigil of prayer in London.

We have also in the past weeks had a series of planning meetings and visits with officials from the Holy See.

We are engaged now in detailed preparation with the U.K. government, local authorities, the Anglican Communion, the police and security services.

It's quite exciting going around to the different venues seeing all the work being done in preparation. I'm finding it difficult to remember being somewhere that was not being redecorated!

Some media sources have been primarily highlighting the negative attitudes of atheists and secularists with regards to Benedict XVI's visit. What would you say about the climate in the parishes and among the public with regard to the upcoming Papal visit?
Yes, there are some people who are questioning the fact of the visit by the Holy Father, and there are those who object quite specifically that his visit is to be a State visit -- the highest level of welcome the United Kingdom can give to a visitor.

There are also those who have fundamental objections to elements of the teaching of the Catholic Church and are taking this opportunity to voice those.

Also, this is a difficult time in the United Kingdom as we face cuts in government spending, and so some of the questions about Pope Benedict's visit are focused on questions about the costs being met from public finance.

I have to say, though, that this contrasts with the sense of welcome and anticipation that there is across a broad spectrum of society, and certainly within the Catholic Church and other Christian communities.

This weekend, in the parish I assist in, people were signing up to be part of the groups travelling to the Mass of beatification and the vigil of prayer.

I was also speaking with a teacher who is engaged in bringing schoolchildren to the celebration of Catholic education that will take place on the second day of the visit, as well as with some of the young people who will be representing their parish during the visits.

Recently the bishops' conferences published a booklet "Heart Speaks Unto Heart," which seeks to give answers to some of the basic questions about the visit. The Papal visit Web site is also very popular.

The Pope has made it clear that he wants to dialogue even with atheists, and all people in the United Kingdom. What do you think will be the particular significance of his upcoming trip for the general public?
One of the ways in which the public as a whole will engage with Pope Benedict will be through the media. How the visit is reported and of course how it is broadcast is therefore essential.

The Holy Father will be seen and will speak in some settings that will be instantly recognizable across the country and throughout the world.

I would hope that this will encourage people to listen to the words of Pope Benedict and to read what he is saying to society as a whole.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster characterizes an overall hope for the visit: that our society will be able to appreciate from Pope Benedict's visit the fact that we can come to understand that faith is a gift to be rediscovered rather than a problem to be solved.

How is this visit expected to be different from John Paul II's 1982 visit?
The visit of Pope John Paul II was a pastoral visit to the Catholics of England, Scotland and Wales.

The Holy Father's whole itinerary in 1982 was constructed around the celebration of the sacraments. Also at the time there was the Falklands War and there had been doubt about whether or not the visit would be going ahead.

This time Pope Benedict comes to visit the whole of British society as well, of course, as celebrating the Eucharist and especially the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman.

Pope John Paul II spent almost nine days in Britain and visited far more places than Pope Benedict will during what is a much shorter visit. In 1982, other than a courtesy visit to the Queen, there were not any of the more formal aspects of a State visit that will be part of Pope Benedict's visit.

Another feature of the visit of Pope John Paul II was that it was much more locally focused as well. Because the visit was longer, the Holy Father visited more places, and so gatherings with him were of people from the local vicinity.

Pope Benedict's visit is centered on four places: Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Birmingham, and so inevitably a lot of travelling will be involved to be present at celebrations with the Holy Father.

This visit holds particular significance because the Pope is responding to an invitation from the Queen. Could you say more about this? Why do you think Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II extended this invitation at this particular time?
The Queen is a practicing Christian and quite clearly a woman of faith. You only have to listen to her Christmas broadcast to appreciate this.

An invitation to undertake a State visit is unique for the visiting Head of State -- it cannot be repeated.

So I am sure it is with a personal warmth and welcome that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II issued the invitation. Though of course in these matters the Queen acts on the advice of the government.

Both the previous and present governments committed to offering the Holy Father a welcome as the spiritual leader of approximately ten percent of the U.K. population, as well as affirming the different areas of cooperation between the U.K. government and the Holy See, especially in tackling poverty in the world and in the shared commitment to education.

The upcoming Papal visit has put the Catholic Church in the spotlight in a more particular way in the United Kingdom. Could you say more about the impact of this publicity? How do you think the Church can use this publicity to reach out to non-Catholics?
I hope that the preparations for the visit and the visit itself will be a time when Catholics will rediscover confidence in ourselves and in our place within British society.

For many reasons that I don't need to rehearse here, it has not been an easy time in recent years being a Catholic in our countries and I see the Holy Father's visit as a moment of affirmation.

It is also a time to recognize the great changes the Church in the United Kingdom has undergone: We are a much more diverse Church, largely through immigration, than we ever were.

It is too a moment for the Gospel message to be proclaimed in the public forum.

We are ready to respond to an increase in interest in the Church and have already sent materials to parishes to help both prepare for the visit and for the period immediately afterwards.

It is a happy coincidence that the Sunday of Pope Benedict's visit is traditionally for us Home Mission Sunday, so it all fits together very well.


On the government website, HM Government (Her Majesty's Government), the government's response to the anti-Pope petition that got a little over 12,000 signatures while it was open on the site:

The government responds
to Protest-the-Pope petition



Too bad for anti-Catholic seculars and atheists that they don't have their own sovereign state so their head of state can make state visits wherever he is invited or take the lead in high-profile events that the Pope's actions and words inevitably are!... But then, the MSM give them almost equal weight as the Pope in news reports about the Pope because they make a convenient cover to express the media's own biases! And they are more than happy to be used in this way because they and their message get free publicity.


This next item I would have titled 'BBC prepares for the Pope - by honing all its hatchets'!


BBC prepares for the papal visit:
Reality betrays its rhetoric
By Edward Pentin



ROME, JULY 22, 2010 (Zenit.org).- When Mark Thompson, the director general of the British Broadcasting Corporation, came to Rome in February to prepare coverage of the upcoming papal visit to Britain, he denied the BBC had an innate bias against the Catholic Church.

He and other BBC managers believe that coverage, like much of its programming, is respectful and balanced, and that programs on the Church are of a high standard. [LOL like a hyena! How could they have said that with a straight face after the farcical defamatory documentary that they presented against Cardinal Ratzinger and the Church in 2006? And how could Pentin forget that egregiously mendacious and slanderous hatchet job? And has anyone really trusted the BBC to be fair on anything since they became downright ideological and dirty during the Vietnam War? They've only become worse since - the polar opposite of the BBC that was legendary for its journalistic excellence during World War II. ]

But as the papal visit nears, how true is this? Judging by programs already aired and rumors of those planned, sadly not very true at all.

According to a number of news sources, the BBC is expected to upset many Catholics when it broadcasts a program timed to coincide with the Pope's Sept. 16-19 visit. The contents of the program remain under wraps, but some news sources say it will be a 90-minute drama that puts the Pope on trial, accused of covering up sex abuse perpetrated by priests. [Previously reported - and it sounds very much, as I commented when this first came up, like the BBC is aiming to do a Rolf Hochhuth-type black propaganda operation on Benedict XVI! Never under-estimate their malice!]

The BBC is being very coy about the rumor. A spokeswoman told me July 21 that programs are being made to coincide with the state visit, but couldn't give details -- even regarding possible content -- for "scheduling reasons." She was also unable to give information about any papal visit-related programs which had already been broadcast.

The most prominent program the corporation has aired so far in connection with the visit has been a BBC Radio 4 drama on Cardinal John Henry Newman, whom the Holy Father will beatify in Birmingham on Sept. 19.

In the play Called "Gerontius" [from the main character in 'The Dream of Gerontius', a famous long poem by Newman about an old man's journey from his deathbed to judgment before God], the lead character was played by the respected actor Derek Jacobi. But the play had nothing to do with the soul's progress toward purgatory, nor did it bring out the relevance to people's lives of Newman's great theological work.

Instead, it focused on his close friendship with Fr. Ambrose St. John -- a friendship gay rights campaigners say was of a homosexual nature, but which Newman scholars stress was simply one of close, fraternal affection. [And that's the kind of prurient obsession the BBC has come down to - the same prurient obsession that marked the 2006 documentary on pediphile priests.]

Reviewing the play in The Catholic Herald, author Francis Phillips wrote: "Halfway through [a] breathless, melodramatic dialogue between Newman and his guardian angel, a young male voice declares: 'The Roman Catholic Church is homophobic!' It is further inferred that Newman's motto, 'From shadows into the truth' [the epitaph on his and St. John's common grave], could be a disguised code for his wanting to come out of the closet." Phillips proposed reading the foremost Newman scholar, Father Ian Ker, instead.

Aside from programs directly related to the papal visit, the BBC has produced some praiseworthy output. In March, Radio 4 broadcast "Heart and Soul," an excellent documentary on suffering and how it can lead to a personal understanding of Christ's resurrection. That same month, BBC News Online carried a very balanced article by Vatican correspondent Gerry O'Connell on the Vatican's media handling of the sexual abuse crisis. [Now, these exceptions do surprise me. And good for the BBC if they managed to come out with two honest pieces for a change. The real story is how these exceptions came to be at all!]

But most programs continue to betray the BBC's dominant secularist leanings. Although it has made an effort to ask a few orthodox-thinking Catholics to appear on its news programs, the majority still tend to be dissenting Catholics.

Those faithful believers who do get on are usually harangued, as was the case on April 5 when an Italian Catholic philosopher and politician, Rocco Buttiglione, appeared on Radio 4's Today program to discuss the sexual abuse crisis. Buttiglione gave a spirited and balanced defense, but was constantly interrupted by presenter John Humphrys.

English priest blogger Father Tim Finigan summed up the problem when in May he wrote about an internal BBC e-mail he had been sent. "The BBC are hosting a staff discussion on Christianity," he wrote on his blog The Hermeneutic of Continuity. "Who do they get to do it? A history professor and campaigner for gay rights who describes his own current religious position as that of an agnostic or atheist with a background in Anglicanism, and a Muslim academic. […] As my correspondent comments, 'How very BBC.'"

And if evidence were needed that the BBC is unable to take the faith with the seriousness it deserves, Cristina Odone, a former editor of The Catholic Herald, wrote April 29 in the Telegraph how angered she was when the BBC sent a comedian to interview her about the clerical sex abuse scandal -- and spent much of the time mocking the faith.

"Would the BBC do this to a Muslim? A Jew? A Hindu?" she asked. "Of course not. They haven't got the guts. But when it comes to the Catholics, send in the clowns."

When I wrote here about the BBC's bias in February, I concluded that among BBC management, there wasn't so much a dominant anti-Catholic animus -- though that undoubtedly exists in some quarters -- as an inability among its predominantly secularist staff to take the faith seriously.

The Church of England tends to agree. Earlier this year, it criticized the BBC's coverage of religion in general as "not good enough" and expressed concern that religious affairs broadcasting is being sidelined. {Perhaps their concern is decades too late!]

Even one of the BBC's erstwhile religious affairs presenters, Roger Bolton, complained in a speech in March that a religious perspective on the news is "so bafflingly absent, both on air and behind the scenes in internal editorial discussions."

But criticizing the BBC is easy to do, and often done. A friend who works for the corporation recently lamented that knocking the "Beeb" is rather like "shooting fish in a barrel -- though fish barrel shooting isn't as popular a sport." Indeed, public broadcasters the world over come in for similar accusations of bias.

In his Rome speech in February, Thompson referred to a few typical jibes: "'Just what is the license-fee for anyway?' 'Abolish it.' 'Why not put a bomb under them,'" he said, adding: "These aren't quotes from the British press. They're from Bild, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Flemish paper De Standaard, Il Giornale and Spiegel. Nor are they about the BBC -- they're about ARD/ZDF, VRT and RAI." [All of them equally secularized to a high degree from all the accounts I see!]

But it could be argued that the BBC's bias against the Catholic Church has more serious and sinister undertones than simply the ordinary flaws of a public broadcaster, ones related not only to a malaise in the corporation but more generally among the country's media elites and perhaps within British culture as a whole.

The BBC, after all, is not the only UK broadcaster to knock the Church: with remarkable though unsurprising chutzpah, Channel 4 has asked gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell to front a documentary on Benedict XVI.

But the BBC is said to particularly suffer from a pervading secular mindset, one that embraces, or is sympathetic to, the culture of death, whether it be abortion, radical feminism, the homosexual agenda, contraception, euthanasia, or unethical science such as embryonic stem cell research. Drug-taking among employees is also said to be widespread.

Recent tragic events involving BBC employees seem to corroborate this view. Ray Gosling, a veteran presenter and prominent gay rights activist, admitted in February that a number of years ago he had suffocated his former male lover who was dying of AIDS. He said he had made a pact with the man to end his life. Soon after his on-air confession, he was arrested on suspicion of murder and released on bail, although the investigation continues.

And over the past two years, three young BBC presenters have died in unusual circumstances, the most recent being Kristian Digby, an openly gay television presenter, who died mysteriously in February at the age of 33.

In 2006, Benedict XVI stressed the importance of saying "no" to the prevailing culture of death, "an anti-culture" which he said manifests itself in such things as escape into drugs.

It is an "escape from reality into the illusory," he said, "into a false happiness that manifests itself in lies, in fraud, in injustice, in contempt for others."

He also said the culture of death "manifests itself in a sexuality that becomes pure gratification without responsibility, that makes man a thing, so to speak, as it no longer considers him a person, with a personal love, with fidelity, but turns him into merchandise."

As an antidote, he advocated the "yes" of the culture of life: fidelity to the Ten Commandments, which he said "are not prohibitions, but a vision of life."

Perhaps we can hope that the BBC and other parts of the UK media will realize the wisdom and relevance of the Holy Father's words when he visits Britain.

Within the corporation and other parts of the country, they are certainly needed.


Pardon me for being utterly cynical, but I don't see the BBC - and all the other MSM in the UK - passing up the opportunity to slam Benedict XVI the hardest immediately before and during the visit.