Pope visit: A welcome message for the nation's leaders

Never has a Christian leader been given so much media coverage and TV airtime as the Pope during his historic visit to Britain in these last few days.

Even those not the slightest bit interested in the Pope would have found it hard to avoid seeing or hearing something of him in the papers, the news, or on the myriad blogs and tweets being posed on the web about his visit each day.

With the nation’s eyes on the leader of the world’s billion Catholics, Christians of all denominations and traditions can be grateful that he has wasted no time in speaking up for the right of Christians to live according to their beliefs and for the legitimate role of faith in the public square.

In the first address of his visit, to the Queen and other dignitaries on Thursday, he condemned attempts to exclude God and religion from public life. Then in the keynote address of his visit, delivered in Westminster yesterday, the Pope told the nation’s politicians of his concern over the marginalisation of religion and attempts to replace Christian festivals like Christmas with secular ones.

“These worrying signs of a failure to appreciate not only the rights of believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, but also the legitimate role of religion in the public square,” he said.

The Pope is not the first person to express such sentiments but he is among the very few to have commanded the full attention of a nation, including its most important leaders.

It is lamentable that some opponents of the Pope – including Christians - have been so devoid of manners that they felt the need to heap spiteful and immature attacks on him and the Catholic Church instead of having the decency to wait to hear what he had to say.

The old saying, “It’s not so much what you say, but the way you say it”, comes to mind. The tone of the opposition has been disgraceful, not least of all because the Pope is, whether they like it or not, a head of state, and because he is, more importantly, the leader of some five million Catholics in Britain.

Which one out of Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry and Terry Pratchett would draw a crowd as big as the Pope has each day of his visit? Yes, the Catholic Church has made mistakes. No, not everyone agrees with what he says all of the time, but the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have turned out to see the Pope each day since he arrived shows that there are plenty of people in this country who support him and the faith he represents – including its opposition to homosexuality, abortion and contraception, views which are not sufficient grounds to deny the Pope the honour of a state visit to these shores.

It is interesting to note that while the numbers of those who want to vent their dissatisfaction at the Pope are tiny in comparison with the supporters who have turned out to cheer him each day, the amount of coverage that the media chooses to give to the likes of the Protest the Pope group, the British Humanist Association, the National Secular Society and atheist poster boy Richard Dawkins makes their impartiality questionable to say the least.

The turnout for his visit, while lower than that of John Paul II’s visit in 1982, is still sizable enough to dismiss the widespread assumption in the media and government that everybody in this country is of the same mind when it comes to homosexuality, abortion and contraception. The views of people of faith should not have the last say but they should at least be given the space to be heard – without fear of being sacked or arrested.

This newspaper is glad that the Pope has made his visit at such a time as this and delivered a message to the nation’s leaders that all Christians can be grateful for.