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The Pope's visit to Britain


paddy

Is the Pope's visit to Britain a good thing?  

122 members have voted

  1. 1. Is the Pope's visit to Britain a good thing?

    • Yes and I AM a Catholic
      15
    • Yes and I'm NOT a Catholic
      19
    • No and I AM a Catholic
      10
    • No and I am NOT a Caholic
      78


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then why do his comments upset non-believers so much?

Look above, he as good as called me a Nazi

And wtf are YOU doing reading the Heil? :P

And wtf are YOU doing reading the Heil? :P

It stares out at me when I'm in the supermarket

As an atheist I don't object to him coming to the country at all I do though object to him being treated as a head of state and all that goes with it. I think that is perfectly reasonable.

He is a Head of State though mate, we have an ambassador at the Vatican.

EDIT: Although if we are striking of the Vatican as an official state (and let's face it most dictators at least have the decency to buy arms from us) then I vote we add Belgium to the list. I hate that little shithole country.

When was the last time you saw a head of state come and preach to his followers. If he's come as head of State, he should be entertained by the Queen, have the opportunity to talk shit in private with the Prime Minister and possibly go grouse shooting at Balmoral or whatever it is the worlds most dysfinctional inbred family do in Scotland. Not go on a whirlwind preaching tour to half capacity audiences where he can sell merch to his fans at highly inflated prices and expect us the tax payer to pay for his **** security whilst his offensive little cult make loads of money to continue their hate campaigns worldwide

And we have an ambassador in the Vatican? well if Cameron wants to look at cutting budgets ....

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On a completely different matter, when did the Daily Heil become an extension of The Tablet or Catholic Weekly, they've been kissing the Pope's ring all week

The Times has been just as bad this week, it makes me **** livid. All their shiny eyed religious correspondants to the fore, prattling on about the importance of religion in our lives.

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I cannot vote as there is no option of 'I couldn't give a stuff either way'

Your tax money is being spent on this visit, you do realize that right?

£12m. Is it really that much if it cheers up a few fanatics, stops them committing suicide, raping/murdering someone or not slip into depression that costs the NHS £12m in treating for the rest of their life?

Personally I'm agnostic. Science tells me there has to be some ID of some sort or the universe isn't as we know it so I'll wait for some evidence either way. Great that the Pope is visiting, it's not adversely affected me yet so I've no complaints. The comments cause me no practical ills i.e. I won't go to a job interview in 10 years time and they won't give me a job because if I'm not Catholic I'm a Nazi. It's his views as the head of the Catholic Church and he's entitled to them. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

Shit I'm liberal these days. Or apathetic. Not sure which.

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I cannot vote as there is no option of 'I couldn't give a stuff either way'

Your tax money is being spent on this visit, you do realize that right?

My tax money has been pissed away on numerous stupid minority projects over the past years, as well as some hugely ridiculous ones like, merely examples, the Millenium Dome, saving the fox, and the Olympics. It will continue to be pissed away on these and other crazy projects long after the German has returned to his Roman bolt hole.

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Everyone seems to mention German and Polish Nazi atrocities during the last war, which most of the Vatican hierarchy turned a blind eye to.... but hardly anyone ever mentions what happened in the former Yugoslavia between the Catholic Croations and the Orthodox Serbs, Jews and Roma. What went on in WW2 in that region was simply appalling and as we all know this left a festering wound, which not so long ago reopened into full scale bloody warfare and retribution - right on Europe's doorstep!

Having been to the former Yugoslavia before the recent bloodshed, I can attest to the hatred and bitterness amongst people towards what happened, which errupted after the death of Tito.

Pavelic's Legacy

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Everyone seems to mention German and Polish Nazi atrocities during the last war, which most of the Vatican hierarchy turned a blind eye to.... but hardly anyone ever mentions what happened in the former Yugoslavia between the Catholic Croations and the Orthodox Serbs, Jews and Roma. What went on in WW2 in that region was simply appalling and as we all know this left a festering wound, which not so long ago reopened into full scale bloody warfare and retribution - right on Europe's doorstep!

Having been to the former Yugoslavia before the recent bloodshed, I can attest to the hatred and bitterness amongst people towards what happened, which errupted after the death of Tito.

I was there during that conflict and it was bad old fashioned extreme nationalism that drove the genocide. Religion was occasionally trotted out as a convenient fig leaf but the driving factor was ethnicity and power politics.

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Excellent and balanced leader in the Indie today:

Let's hear it for tolerance

Supposed liberals can sometimes be both illiberal and selective about opinions with which they do not agree. Many readers of this newspaper will not agree with the Pope's teaching on contraception, abortion, equal rights for women and gay people, or transubstantiation.

Nor, as it happens, do an awful lot of Britain's Roman Catholics – we report new survey evidence today which finds that nine in ten Catholics in this country accept contraception and seven in ten support a woman's right to choose abortion. But that does not mean that they want to leave their church, or that they are embarrassed by the visit to these shores of its leader.

Nor should it mean that the non-Catholic majority should be offended by the state visit of Benedict XVI. There was a reasoned debate to be had – some time ago, to be blunt – about whether the British taxpayer should help to fund the trip. Joan Smith makes the case against in a measured tone on page 53. But some of the reaction to the Pope has been shrill, mean-spirited and intolerant.

Of all the media furores that attended the Pope's arrival, the one about a cardinal who said that landing at Heathrow was like arriving in a "third world country" (which was then glossed by a genius in the Church's communications department as a reference to our "multicultural" society rather than to the state of the Piccadilly Line) was the least important. The serious one, of course, is the Vatican's handling of the scandal of the sexual abuse of children by priests over the years. In many ways, the Pope's record on this issue is poor, and his words in Westminster Cathedral yesterday of "sorrow", acknowledging "the shame and humiliation" of these sins, are inadequate. Secularists are bound to observe that all the attempts by the Roman Catholic Church to make amends for past crimes and to prevent further abuse are undermined by its adherence to the doctrine of celibacy, one of most obvious contributory factors.

Yet, although it must be unlikely that Benedict XVI will be remembered as a great pope, history may record that he was the one who finally started to confront the issue. It is possible to see him as the unfortunate leader with poor communication skills inheriting a terrible mess from his charismatic predecessor. Perhaps that was what Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were discussing as they sat in the front row before the Pope addressed Parliament on Friday.

Whatever one's view of the Pope's personal culpability in the child abuse scandal, or the Church's collective guilt, it needs to be balanced in any reasonable view by the power of the modern Catholic Church for good, as expounded by Paul Vallely on page 52. The Church's social message, its capacity for good works, and the practical contribution of its members to the fight against poverty, at home and abroad (despite unhelpful dogma about contraception and HIV), should not be disdained. The demands of Richard Dawkins and the letter-writing luvvies that the Pope should be arrested is not only disproportionate and intolerant, it is poor tactics. If it is in the interest of the great liberal cause to persuade more Catholics to move further in the direction of the enlightened attitudes to sexuality that the survey we report today confirms most already hold, then it is not sensible to behave as if all Catholics are the deluded followers of a criminal cult leader.

Some of the condemnation of the Catholic Church as an institution also betrays selectivity. Some of those accusing the Vatican of being misogynist, homophobic and obscurantist would never use such language about Islam.

The Independent on Sunday is a liberal newspaper. We believe in the equal rights of all people. We also recognise the contradiction in the idea of equality irrespective of an individual's religion when one of the obstacles to the realisation of that goal is organised religion in various guises. A number of these have similar historical-cultural roots. But if Catholics, or Muslims, or conservative Jews, feel that they are a besieged minority, surrounded by what the Pope calls "aggressive" secularists, it will be more difficult to dismantle the obstacles to equality.

Subjecting the leader and the symbol of the Catholic faith to unseemly ridicule is neither wise nor liberal, because the value that ought to define modern liberalism, above all, is tolerance.

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I like the INdie but that piece falls well wide of the mark.

The demands of Richard Dawkins and the letter-writing luvvies that the Pope should be arrested is not only disproportionate and intolerant, it is poor tactics.

Fancy anyone suggesting that someone who has been highly prolific in covering up child abuse be arrested. Disproportionate? Intolerant? Poor tactics? or an article completely open to ridicule? the latter I think.

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I like the INdie but that piece falls well wide of the mark.

The demands of Richard Dawkins and the letter-writing luvvies that the Pope should be arrested is not only disproportionate and intolerant, it is poor tactics.

Fancy anyone suggesting that someone who has been highly prolific in covering up child abuse be arrested. Disproportionate? Intolerant? Poor tactics? or an article completely open to ridicule? the latter I think.

Indeed Bicks. Dawkins has been an easy target for the shiny-eyed brigade. Intolerant? The Pope was the Cardinal in charge of the area of the church tasked to deal with matters such as child abuse, yet time and time again he failed to act. Look at the Father Murphy case in the US. He was the one abusing kids at a school for the deaf since the 1950s, and yet even when there was cast iron evidence against him the evil Nazi refused to act against him. He is scum, pure and simple. Easy to attack well meaning people like Dawkins and Hitchens who don't have countless ill gotten billions to launch a PR campaign.

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Interesting that the Indie gives him credit for finally confronting the child abuse issue. In fact, his handling of it has been a history of complicity, concealment, evasion, and silence. Only now that some sort of action is inescapable is he making a few anodyne remarks.

There's a much better leader column here.

The first state papal visit to Britain was bound not to disappoint. Before it even got under way, the Vatican's leading expert on relations with the Church of England compared arriving in multicultural Britain to landing in a third world country, and talked of an "aggressive new atheism" abroad in the country. If Cardinal Walter Kasper's gout had not prevented him from flying, his remarks would have. Even Vatican watchers like Clifford Longley from The Tablet were aghast: "I don't think he believes Britain is in the grip of secular atheism, and he shouldn't have said so."

However, Pope Benedict went on to say exactly that, lambasting atheist extremism and aggressive secularism, and ruing the damage the exclusion of God had done to public life in the last century. This, too, had to be parsed. It turned out that he was talking about the Nazis, not Richard Dawkins – although there were problems with that thesis too. What about pro-German De Valera, or Spain, Croatia and Slovakia, where the Catholic church was pro-Nazi?

One would have thought that the Vatican would have had enough time to make sure that everyone was singing from the same hymn sheet and that the tune would not be wildly discordant, even to the ears of British Catholics. But the pope is not in any sense a modern man. He believes that there is only one Christian church – his – which represents the word of God. He was quite clear yesterday about the difficulties that the ecumenical path of unity between the Catholic and Anglican churches has encountered and continues to encounter. Further, he believes that there is only one one spiritual source – again his – from which all our values derive. He is attacking not only the Reformation, the separation of church and state, but the very basis on which a secular society is built.

Again, it is not just the fashion in which this message is made but its content which is troubling. The Catholic church is still able to influence and inspire, but not one that covers up sex abuse scandals or is unable, like the leader of the church in Belgium, to apologise for them; not one whose teachings on contraception, remarriage and homosexuality are ignored; not one whose congregations are voting with their feet – 40% drop in attendance in England and Wales, 25% drop in weddings, 25% drop in priests. Should not responsibility for the marginalisation of religion that the pope talked about yesterday in Westminster Hall be shared? Are the enemies solely external, or does the behaviour of the church and its priests play a part? A little less preaching and a bit more humility might help the next state visit of a pope.

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