When the staff of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity were told on Tuesday that Cardinal Walter Kasper – their boss of 10 years, who retired just a few weeks ago – would not be joining the papal visit to Britain, they took it as a major blow.This was a man who had good relations with the Church of England, particularly with Rowan Williams, and who had been asked to join the papal entourage to provide both continuity and act as a translator for the meeting between Dr Williams and his own successor, Archbishop Kurt Koch, who speaks very little English.
Koch and Williams are due to have a breakfast meeting as well as formal talks at Lambeth Palace during the visit.
The disappointment at Kasper's no-show reflected the view that he, more than most in Rome, had expertise when it comes to dealing with Anglican relations and had an understanding of Britain.
At that stage, the Christian Unity team believed Kasper was out because of a dose of gout.
But just the day before, an interview with Kasper had appeared in the German magazine, Focus, which suggested that he was not quite so simpatico to Britain as his colleagues might have believed.
Speculation has grown ever since that he was taken off the visit as a result of his gaffe-strewn remarks.
When news of Kasper's comments on Britain began to spread fast around Rome on Wednesday morning – "England is a secularised, pluralistic country nowadays. When you land at Heathrow you sometimes feel as though you were in a third world country", and "An aggressive neo-atheism has spread.
If you wear a crucifix when you fly with BA, you are discriminated against" – it conjured up a man who doesn't get Britain and someone who doesn't know the meaning of diplomatic language.
Perhaps who he was talking to might explain some of this candour. Focus is a conservative German weekly, and the interview with Kasper was conducted by its Rome correspondent, Eva Kallinger.
Kallinger is a longstanding Vatican-watcher and knowledgeable about church affairs. But she has told other writers that she did not find her fellow German's opinions odd, that what he meant was that Britain is far more multicultural than other European nations and so you see far more races at Heathrow than at any other airport in Europe.
And that means, apparently, that they are people who do not come from Christian Europe. As someone I know who lived in Germany for many years put it: "Germans have never developed a language of political correctness."
What bothers Kasper and that other German, Benedict XVI, is that Europe is in danger of losing its Christian roots. In the interview he also went on to say, "Everyone who knows England, knows that it also has a great Christian tradition.
Europe would not be Europe if it could not preserve this tradition."
Kasper, like Benedict, is also deeply concerned about the Church of England and fears that it is on the point of schism over women bishops and gay priests.
And while people might assume that Rome is keen for that schism if it means hundreds of Anglicans cross the Tiber and become part of what is called an "ordinariate" – a special grouping of Anglicans within the Roman Catholic church – if you talk to people at the pontifical council in Rome and, indeed, to the Catholic hierarchy here in Britain, they want the established church here to be strong.
But what is truly baffling about Kasper's comments about the third world in Britain, the idea that this country is full of people who are not from Christian Europe, is that these are the people who are bolstering Britain's religious communities.
If there is one church in Britain whose congregations are a melting pot, it is the Roman Catholic church.
Once dominated by Irish migrants, Catholic churches now have rainbow congregations – Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, Spanish, Italians, Brazilians, Costa Ricans, Ghanains, Nigerians, and people from many Middle Eastern countries, including Iraqis and Palestinian Christians who have fled the troubles in their homelands.
Plenty of them arrived recently and are the kind of people who keep London going through their employment as cleaners, taxi drivers, catering staff and shop assistants.
In fact, they're just the kind of people who work at Heathrow. Cardinal Kasper, take note.
SIC: TG/UK