Benedict In Britain
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
26 Sep 2010
Pope Benedict's visit to Britain last weekend to beatify Cardinal John Newman was a great success, against the expectations of his anti-religious opponents.
Pope Benedict himself noted that other countries, such as France and the Czech Republic, have contested Britain's claim to be the world's most secular country but England does have considerable form.
One English Catholic spokesman claimed that London in particular "has been and is the geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death" and "one of the most anti-Catholic landscapes culturally" to be found anywhere.
In 1982 when Pope John Paul made a pastoral visit to England hostile Protestants objected. Today their place in this ancient tradition was taken by noisy secularists, while the Bible Christians welcomed the Pope as a crucial ally for New Testament faith and morals against a corrosive liberalism.
In the last twenty years or so English reticence has not served the Christians well in the battle of ideas against the crass anti-Catholic extremists who regularly have the inside running on the B.B.C. and in newspapers like the Guardian and the Independent. Certainly the Pope's visit will give the Christian rank and file heart to join battle and continue to persevere. I was not at all surprised that Catholics turned out so well in many tens of thousands. The faith is not dead, nor dying.
England was Catholic for more than one thousand years before Henry VIII, so the Prime Minister David Cameron was correct in pointing to the continuing role played by Christianity, while the Pope noted the thirst for religion.
His Holiness met Queen Elizabeth at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, prayed at the tomb of the Catholic King, St. Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey and delivered an historic address on reason and religion in public life in Westminster Hall built in 1099 where St. Thomas More was condemned.
The Pope explained that Christian foundations underpin democratic freedoms, as he praised British traditions of tolerance and justice and their struggle against Nazism in the Second World War. On the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain his tribute to the pilots who won that early victory was especially poignant.
The beatification ceremony for Cardinal Newman, priest, scholar, educator, master of the English language took place in Birmingham. A convert from Anglicanism in those un-ecumenical times, Catholics and Anglicans are now co-workers in presenting Christ's message to society and resisting the noisy zealots who want to destroy Christian values.
