Fair Treatment

Virtually every article I've read in various British papers on the topic of the Holy Father's visit to the UK has been heavily saturated with negativity and suspicion, in other words, pretty much what you'd expect to find in the periodicals of a nation that had rabid anti-Catholicism on the books for centuries.

This piece, appearing in the Telegraph, and written by Eamon Duffy, is surprisingly balanced.

The young Ratzinger was a reform-minded theological liberaliser. As Pope, he is anxious in the face of a culture seemingly in the process of shedding its inherited Christian values. He has come to believe that the Church itself took a wrong turn in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, absorbing a naive secular optimism which underestimated human capacity for evil, and eroding in the process the power and distinctiveness of the Christian message. He favours a Church more sharply defined around clearer certainties, even at the price of a shrinkage in numbers and popularity. In 2007 he gave symbolic expression to these concerns by restoring the use of the old Latin Mass, to the dismay of many of the world’s bishops who were not consulted.

His Christianity is by no means all gloom: he has surprised those who thought of him as “God’s rottweiler” with two encyclicals which are profound and beautiful meditations on the virtues of love and of hope. His public utterances are subtler and more nuanced than his critics allow. But nuance translates badly into media-speak, and Benedict lacks the art of the soundbite. As a communicator of challengingly counter-cultural ideas, he has proved accident-prone.

The Pope will speak in Westminster Hall from the spot on which St Thomas More was condemned to death for his refusal to renounce the papacy and recognise Henry VIII as head of a purely English national church. The resonances of that heroic defiance are overwhelming, as is the mere fact of the Pope’s presence at the symbolic heart of a nation whose identity for centuries focussed itself round the vigorous repudiation of papal authority. The invitation to speak in Westminster Hall suggests that, five centuries after the Reformation, the Pope is perceived as having something worth hearing to say about the values that shape and bind British civil society.