When Pope Benedict steps on to the airport tarmac at Edinburgh on Thursday morning, he will walk into the full blaze of media hype – but also into the immense shadow of his Polish predecessor, Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II. Papa Wotjyla’s pastoral visit to Britain in May 1982 was the first ever by a reigning pope, but it almost did not happen.
A month earlier, Britain had gone to war with Catholic Argentina over the Falkland Islands.
The Vatican, unsurprisingly, seriously considered aborting the visit. In the end the pope came, but made peace and reconciliation the main theme of his preaching.
His tour turned out to be a triumph, with capacity crowds at every venue, and almost uniformly favourable television and press coverage.
For Pope John Paul, then four years into his pontificate, was an international hero. The election of a Polish pope had captured the world’s imagination, and Wotjyla himself seemed almost a superman – young for a pope at 62, he was a poet, dramatist, and philosopher of distinction.
He was also muscular Christianity incarnate, an athlete as much at home on the ski-slopes as in the pulpit. In his youth he had been goalkeeper in a Jewish soccer team, and he had endured forced labour under Nazi occupation.
As Archbishop of Krakow during the Cold War, he had displayed courage and cunning in protecting his church against a hostile communist regime. His return to Poland as pope in 1979 triggered the political avalanche which brought Soviet domination there to an end.
In 1982, Pope John Paul found a British church in good heart. Membership had peaked the year before with almost five million Catholics, and there were more than 7,000 priests to serve the parishes.
The Church’s moral standing was high. So was Catholic confidence. Education and social mobility had moved members of a once predominantly working-class church into positions of power and influence.
In England their new status was symbolised by the leadership of Cardinal Basil Hume, an aristocratic monk whose brother-in-law was Secretary to the Cabinet, and whom the Queen liked to call “my Cardinal”.
Almost 30 years on, things look very different. The Catholic population has remained fairly constant. But regular Mass attendance has leaked steadily, clergy numbers have dwindled by more than 20 per cent, and the average age of serving priests is now over 60.
With fewer than 250 men currently in training for the English priesthood, the Catholic community faces a looming crisis in clerical provision.
Catholic morale and moral credibility have taken a special battering from the revelations here, as across Europe and the US, of cases of physical and sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy, and the hardly less devastating exposure of a culture of institutional secrecy that often put the interests of the Church before the welfare of the victims.
Pope Benedict’s personal revulsion at these revelations is not in doubt. In a series of Good Friday meditations delivered while still a cardinal, he denounced the “filth” that had entered into the heart of the Church. But under his pontificate the Vatican has responded defensively to the crisis, slow to grasp its seriousness and the need for complete openness in dealing with it.
The numbers of priests involved in such cases is miniscule, but the impact on the decent majority of the clergy has been crushing.
Even in the broadsheet press, indiscriminate disparagement of all priests as potential abusers is on the way to replacing gunpowder treason or the cruelties of the Inquisition as the stuff of a resurgent and apparently visceral anti-Catholicism.
All the more extraordinary, therefore, that Pope Benedict comes to Britain not like John Paul, on a pastoral tour, but on a state visit. He will address representatives of civil society, including members of both houses of Parliament, in Westminster Hall on September 17.
The papacy’s 1,000-year-old rule of central Italy, the “temporal power”, was brought to an end by the unification of Italy, but was replaced in 1929 by Mussolini’s recognition of the tiny Vatican City as a sovereign state, ensuring the pope’s political freedom as head of a global church. That church now encompasses more than a billion human beings.
The Holy See has diplomatic representation to almost 180 countries, and punches far above its weight in the fields of development and humanitarian aid. The political reality of the papacy’s influence was made visible at the funeral of John Paul II when almost 200 heads of state jostled to be seen in attendance.
But Benedict XVI is no John Paul II. He shares his predecessor’s dismay at the hedonistic nihilism of much of modern secular culture, but there is nothing muscular about the Christianity of this fastidious and frail lover of cats and the music of Mozart.
Benedict has a more refined intellect than John Paul II: he is the only first-rank theologian to be elected pope for centuries. But professors of theology seldom make adroit leaders.
The young Ratzinger was a reform-minded theological liberaliser. As Pope, he is anxious in the face of a culture seemingly in the process of shedding its inherited Christian values. He has come to believe that the Church itself took a wrong turn in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, absorbing a naive secular optimism which underestimated human capacity for evil, and eroding in the process the power and distinctiveness of the Christian message.
He favours a Church more sharply defined around clearer certainties, even at the price of a shrinkage in numbers and popularity. In 2007 he gave symbolic expression to these concerns by restoring the use of the old Latin Mass, to the dismay of many of the world’s bishops who were not consulted.
His Christianity is by no means all gloom: he has surprised those who thought of him as “God’s rottweiler” with two encyclicals which are profound and beautiful meditations on the virtues of love and of hope.
His public utterances are subtler and more nuanced than his critics allow. But nuance translates badly into media-speak, and Benedict lacks the art of the soundbite. As a communicator of challengingly counter-cultural ideas, he has proved accident-prone.
The Pope will speak in Westminster Hall from the spot on which St Thomas More was condemned to death for his refusal to renounce the papacy and recognise Henry VIII as head of a purely English national church.
The resonances of that heroic defiance are overwhelming, as is the mere fact of the Pope’s presence at the symbolic heart of a nation whose identity for centuries focussed itself round the vigorous repudiation of papal authority.
The invitation to speak in Westminster Hall suggests that, five centuries after the Reformation, the Pope is perceived as having something worth hearing to say about the values that shape and bind British civil society.
But many within that society, including many Catholics, are conscious that Benedict’s church has been compromised in the eyes of many by its recent history. Neither Church nor Pope can address society now from some imagined moral high ground. The Pope will need to recognise that fact, both in what he says and how he says it.
On his last day in Britain, Pope Benedict will beatify the great Victorian Catholic writer and thinker, Cardinal John Henry Newman.
Like the Pope, Newman believed that the society of his day was cutting itself adrift from the religious values which had given the nation its distinctive moral and religious character. But he also believed that mere denunciation did no good.
If Christian values were to survive, they had to commend themselves by their intrinsic attraction, “not by refutation so much as by an antagonist truth”.
The young Ratzinger was deeply influenced by the writings of this very English saint: as Pope he could do worse than follow his master’s advice, and make the positive presentation of that “antagonist truth” the keynote of his visit.
- Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Magdalene College. His history of the popes, 'Saints and Sinners’, is published by Yale University Press