London
As international controversies go, the launch of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain yesterday seemed staid and uneventful: A relatively pomp-free descent from a commercial jetliner into surprisingly uncrowded streets of Edinburgh; a series of short speeches with the Queen, Scottish separatist premier Alex Salmond and numerous church dignitaries, and a quiet mass in Glasgow.
But beneath the surface was a war of words backed with the sort of artillery power rarely seen since the Reformation. The Queen, the Pope, his prominent cardinal and a host of important British thinkers engaged in an intense rhetorical sparring match yesterday, the goal of which was to position themselves as the forces of better good at a moment when church and state are both in disrepute. Here, a guide to the day’s pointed words and their deeper meanings.
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POPE BENEDICT XVI
WHAT THEY SAID
In his Edinburgh speech before the Queen, he warned against the “atheist extremism of the twentieth century” which, he said, led to the horrors of Nazism. Britain, he said, should “always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate.” He argued that Britain’s freedoms had a “Christian foundation.”
WHAT IT MEANT
Pope Benedict is here in an effort to make peace with the Church of England. He will be beatifying Cardinal John Henry Newman, the nineteenth-century writer who began the British tradition of converting from Anglicanism to Catholicism as an expression of conservative politics. But his main target is resurgent atheism in one of the world’s most secular countries. By equating Britain’s atheists with Nazis, he turned up the rhetoric, and drew attention away from the charge, that he had done nothing to stop the mass rape of children by priests during his years as the Vatican’s chief disciplinary officer.
IMPLICATIONS
This seemed to be part of an effort to move the Roman Catholic Church’s response to the child-rape epidemic from a defensive one to an offensive position - one that was bolstered by the existence of an organized anti-religious lobby in Britain. The image of a church under siege from apostates is more appealing than one of rapist priests escaping criminal charges. But shifting the “Nazi” slur from Benedict and the church, with its troubled relationship with fascism, to the atheist opposition is a risky move.
[caption id=”attachment_512” align=”alignleft” width=”600” caption=”The Pope in Glasgow. Photo: Phil Noble/Reuters”]
THE QUEEN
WHAT THEY SAID
After praising the Pope’s predecessor, John Paul II, for helping bring peace to Northern Ireland, the Queen made her rhetorical point: “Your presence here reminds us of our common Christian heritage … religion has always been a crucial element in national identity and historical self-consciousness.” And she stuck in a subtle barb: “Your Holiness, in recent times you have said that religions can never become vehicles of hatred. That never by invoking the name of God can evil and violence be justified …Today in this country we stand united in this conviction.”
WHAT IT MEANT
Queen Elizabeth surprised many observers by endorsing the Pope’s message so boldly. Of course she, like the Pope, is both a head of state and the leader of a religion (she is head of the Church of England), and has an interest in connecting the two. By making the self-justifying connection between religious faith and national identity - a connection that has not existed in reality for centuries - she, like Pope Benedict, was able to shift attention away from deeper questions of her own role in Britain. She also managed to subtly condemn the child-rape crisis without mentioning it explicitly.
IMPLICATIONS
It would be a gross historical understatement to say that Britain has been poisoned by Catholic-Protestant divisions over the past 500 years, and the Queen’s predecessors have played key and sometimes bloody roles. Today, it is different: Britain actually has more Roman Catholic churchgoers than Anglicans now, so the Queen has reason to want to bring both denominations into her fold. But a higher purpose seemed to be at work: Preserving the legitimacy of seemingly anachronistic unelected offices through periods when they have fallen into question.
CARDINAL WALTER KASPER
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WHAT THEY SAID
Cardinal Kasper, the Pope’s top official responsible for relations with the Church of England, gave an interview with Germany’s Focus Magazine this week in which he described his views of multiracial, largely nonreligious Britain: “England today is a secularized, pluralistic country. When you land at Heathrow Airport, you sometimes think you might have landed in a Third World country.” He was not referring to the airport’s lineups or its public washrooms. He also spoke out against an “aggressive new atheism” that “has spread in England,” citing British Airways’ policy forbidding flight crew from wearing religious symbols.
WHAT IT MEANT
Cardinal Kasper was immediately removed from the Pope’s entourage on the British visit, despite his important role. His words created a storm of controversy in Britain. Yet the Pope’s speech seemed to repeat many of the sentiments he expressed: the sense that there is now an organized atheist enemy, the opposition to polyglot, multicultural society, the opposition to the modernity of the past hundred years, including the Second Vatican Council.
IMPLICATIONS
The Vatican announced yesterday afternoon that Cardinal Kasper would not be apologizing. In fact, spokesman Monsignor Oliver Lahl amplified his remarks: “All he was saying is that when you arrive in Britain today it is like arriving in Islamabad, Mumbai and Kinshasa all at the same time… Britain is no longer a mono-cultural country.” But the remarks caused a storm of angry response from Britain’s Catholic leaders - indicating that, on key cultural matters, there is a deep schism between the Vatican’s conservative core and its operations in less religious countries.
STEPHEN FRY
WHAT THEY SAID
Yesterday the celebrated actor and Internet wit organized a group of 50 intellectuals and authors including novelists Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman, evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins and philosopher A.C. Grayling in calling for the Pope’s trip not to be recognized as a state visit. “We reject the masquerading of the Holy See as a state and the pope as a head of state as merely a convenient fiction to amplify the international influence of the Vatican,” they wrote. They cited the Pope’s opposition to condoms and birth control and his promotion of religiously segregated education.
WHAT IT MEANT
The British lawyer Geoffrey Robertson this week published a lengthy legal brief, The Case of the Pope (available as a Penguin paperback), which lays out the case that the Pope should not be recognized as a head of state because the Holy See, his Vatican City “nation,” does not have the characteristics of a real country and was created in an illegitimate deal between the Vatican and fascist leader Benito Mussolini. While no British legal figure is likely to recognize this case, it does indicate that there is a deep vein of skepticism directed at Pope Benedict from many corners of British society, exacerbated by his questionable role in the child-rape scandal.
IMPLICATIONS
While nobody at the political level would dare mention such arguments, it is telling that Prime Minister David Cameron made a point of spending yesterday in Brussels and is avoiding anything but a private engagement with the Pope through much of his visit. Even though the views of prominent atheists such as Mr. Fry are anathema to his Conservative Party loyalists, it’s apparent that they express a sufficiently prevalent British sentiment that Mr. Cameron does not see it in his interests to associate himself with Pope Benedict any more than necessary.
