The papal visit made Britain more open to the spiritual life, the Archbishop of Westminster has said.
Speaking
in an interview with the news agency Zenit, Archbishop Vincent Nichols
said that the Pope’s visit to Britain led to “a more ready recognition
of the spiritual dimension to human life”.
The archbishop said
that Pope Benedict’s trip to Britain in September gave British Catholics
a renewed sense of identity and also allowed British society as a whole
to recognise the value of relationships and communities.
He said:
“I think what people saw was that despite the apparent anonymity of so
much of British society, here was a community that expressed itself
strongly with bonds of friendship and acceptance, and that has awakened
in people the desire to work a little bit more on their families, on
their quality of relationship.”
Archbishop Nichols said that Pope Benedict had also laid the framework for a dialogue between society and “faith communities”.
The
Prime Minister David Cameron said that the Government’s role was to
create “a culture of greater social responsibility and that the faith
communities were the architects of that culture”, the archbishop said.
He said “I think there is in Britain today a new openness to the role that communities of faith can make to the common good.”
Pope
Benedict, he said, shared a love for the Church and the search for
truth with Blessed John Henry Newman. He said both Blessed John Henry
and the Pope had a “similar openess of mind towards how to approach
other people and speak to them”.
Asked how Blessed John Henry
could be a model for British Catholics today, the archbishop quoted Pope
Benedict speaking about Blessed John Henry on the papal plane, saying
that two of the Pope’s phrases had stayed in his mind.
He said:
“He said, first of all, Newman is a man of modernity. Now by that he
means Newman is a man who lived within sight of the circumstances in
which atheism would be a real possibility and in which agnosticism had
begun to be experienced. So Newman is a man who struggled with a setting
for Christianity which we are all very familiar with. He foresaw it and
struggled with it in his time.”
Archbishop Nichols also said that
Blessed John Henry was “a man for whom the formulas of the past were
not sufficient”.
He said Blessed John Henry did not represent a return
to the past but an exploration “in utter fidelity to the past, an
expression and an experience of faith which is attractive and open to
the minds of today”.
SIC: CHO/INT'L