The highlight of the Pope’s visit to Britain could take place at the largely disused Longbridge car plant. Sources told The Tablet, the Roman Catholic magazine, that the site of the former MG Rover factory is now the “preferred venue” for Benedict XVI’s beatification of Cardinal Newman.
It is claimed that as many as 100,000 pilgrims could attend an open-air Mass at the site in the south of Birmingham, to see the pontiff take England’s most famous convert to Rome one step closer to sainthood.
Much of the vast Longbridge site remains vacant, after MG Rover went bust in 2005, although the new MG6 is being built there by the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation and a further 468 acres are being redeveloped to include homes, a college and shops.
For many the name is synonymous with the decline of British manufacturing, from the strikes led by Derek “Red Robbo” Robinson in the 1970s when the plant was run by British Leyland to the loss of 6,000 jobs when the Phoenix Consortium took MG Rover into administration.
But Longbridge is just a few minutes’ walk away from the Catholic cemetery on Rednal Hill where Cardinal Newman was buried in 1890, and beatification ceremonies are meant to take places at locations linked to their subject’s life or death.
It is thought that the Church now sees Longbridge as a suitable site for the event because it can hold half as many people as the first choice, Coventry Airport, making it cheaper to host and also making security easier to arrange.
The Church has now confirmed Bellahouston Park in Glasgow as the location of one of the public gathering’s during the Pope’s three-day visit in September, with Susan Boyle likely to sing there, but it is still trying to keep costs down after they were estimated to have doubled to £14million.
Meanwhile Lord Patten, the Catholic Tory grandee appointed by the Government to oversee its organisation of the first ever state papal visit to Britain, suggested that the Pope may address David Cameron’s pet idea of the Big Society.
“Education is going to play a part as will what the Government has said about the Big Society and its connections with Catholic social teaching themes such as solidarity and subsidiarity,” Lord Patten told The Tablet.