A PROTOCOL team from the Vatican will visit the UK next week to examine the arrangements for the Pope’s visit in September.Details of the Pope’s programme will be released, “as is customary”, two months before the visit, which runs from 16 to 19 September, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Revd Vincent Nichols, said on Tuesday.
A decision on whether to use Coventry Airport for the papal mass and beatification of Cardinal Newman was expected within a week.
The Archbishop also expected Hyde Park to be used for a vigil on the Saturday night of the visit.
“Permission has been given.”
He was speaking at the launch in London of a booklet, Heart speaks unto heart: The visit of Pope Benedict XVI, United Kingdom 2010, which will be sent to all RC parishes this weekend.
Taking its title from Cardinal Newman’s motto, it is intended to address the gaps in the public knowledge of “the call of faith . . . and the role of the Catholic Church”.
Quoting from it, Archbishop Nichols said, in an apparent reference to recent scandals affecting the RC Church: “It is not easy to convey the richness of the tradition of Catholic thought, and Catholicism can easily become defined in the public mind in the light of one or two current controversies.”
The Archbishop hoped that it would show, as the Pope intended, that “Faith in God is not a problem to be solved but a gift to be rediscovered. We have in this country got into a cul-de-sac that thinks it is a problem to be solved.”
SIC: CTUK