I’ve written a piece in tomorrow’s Spectator revealing that arrangements for the Pope’s visit to Britain are in a state of utter disarray.Estimated costs to the Church of £7 million are reported to have doubled, and last week Archbishop Vincent Nichols is rumoured to have suggested to the Vatican that the Beatification Mass at Coventry Airport should be replaced by a cut-price ceremony at St Mary’s, Oscott, the Birmingham seminary.
That would have meant scaling down the congregation from about 200,000 to nearer 10,000.
Rome’s reponse: no, the Beatification of John Henry Newman must be at Coventry.
That leaves the Church’s contribution to the papal visit heading towards £14 million.
How are they going to raise the cash?
Many Catholics who have donated towards the (supposedly) £7 million total are already angry that they won’t get tickets for Coventry on September 19.
As for the planned Hyde Park prayer vigil, the venue hasn’t yet been booked, a spokeswoman for the Royal Parks said yesterday.
It looks like Mgr Andrew Summersgill, the organiser of the visit, has made a mess of things: no surprise, given the profligacy of Eccleston Square when he was general secretary.
But my article also asks questions about Magi [sic] Cleaver, a politically correct former adviser to Tony Blair, whose role is pivotal to the exercise but who is “below the radar”, as my source puts it.
Very true: you try finding her name on the papal visit website.
Indeed, as I say in the Spectator, the itinerary of the Pope’s visit has a Blairite feel to it:
[There are] suspicions in Rome that Benedict XVI is unwittingly being caught up in a Blairite publicity stunt bearing the fingerprints of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.
For example, the Foreign Office document officially announcing the Pope’s visit describes it as “an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen ties between the UK and the Holy See on global action to tackle poverty and climate change, as well as the important role of faith groups in creating strong communities”.
This is unmistakeably the language of Blair’s Faith Foundation, with which Catholic Church in England and Wales worked closely during Summersgill’s tenure at Eccleston Square: Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor acted as an adviser to it, and would have joined its board had the Pope not stopped him.
Parts of the itinerary drawn up for the Pope also read like extracts from a Tony Blair Foundation conference. There are numerous meetings with non-Catholics and “People of Faith”; there is no sign of any visits to a hospice, crisis pregnancy centre or adoption agency which might take the Pope into areas of Catholic teaching from which the Blairs have publicly dissented.
These matters are glossed over, just as they were when Mr Blair was discreetly received into the Catholic Church by his friend Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor without being asked to disavow his support for abortion.
Such sleight of hand might annoy any Pope; it is particularly inappropriate for Benedict XVI given his disdain for Blairite strand of Catholicism-lite. For months, there have been fears in Rome the visit was being hijacked.
But there was little they could do, given the secretive nature of the “magic circle” …
Such a lack of transparency is reminiscent of the New Labour project to which the Bishops of England and Wales gave such uncritical support; indeed, the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church is one of the last bastions of Blairite patronage and back-slapping.
I knew something like this would happen as soon as I learned of the decision to put the visit in the hands of Summersgill: with the exception of Bishop Kieran Conry, I can’t think of a leading English cleric less in sympathy with Pope Benedict’s liturgical and theological views.
Summersgill, according to my source, hopes that the exercise will earn him a mitre.
Not at this rate it won’t.
SIC: TCUK