Lord Patten: the lessons

The PM's personal representative for the visit, writing in the Mirror:

There is a secular culture and consumerism sometimes seems king but, for many people, faith is what helps them through the day.

One sign of the Pope's relevance is the numbers who turned out to greet him, not just at the events but from Edinburgh to Glasgow, and in London, the roads were lined with people who wanted to cheer him.

[snip]

I hope the visit will make us think deeper about the sort of society we live in and want to live in. I hope it will make us think more about our social responsibilities. I hope it will make us realise we need a serious dialogue between religious and secular groups.

I hope it will give people of all faiths more self confidence to stand up for themselves and to make the point that faith matters to society.

Max Clifford: visit was a PR success

The PR guru tells the BBC:

I think he got better coverage in the British media than I expected. In the build-up to the visit there was far more criticism than praise and then after he arrived far more praise than criticism. The pluses far outweighed the minuses.

From a PR perspective there is a huge amount that needs to be done, but the visit was a success - far more a success than I thought it might have been.

Archbishop Kelly: negativity 'swept away'

The Archbishop of Liverpool tells the Liverpool Echo:

“All the cynicism and the negativity has been swept aside by ordinary people – mass gatherings which represented a cross-section of our society, rather than just one group.”

Anne Applebaum: visit success showed benefits of religious freedom

Writing in the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum notes how vicious were the attacks on the Church -- but how the media gave plenty of airtime to the Church's defenders in response, so ensuring a success.

All in all, it was a huge success. But had the pope been treated politely from the start, I suspect he would have come and gone without a trace. The vast majority of Britons are not Catholic and would have tuned out deferential accounts of his sermons. The press would have relegated the whole thing to the religion section. Perhaps the faithful would still have gone to Mass, though maybe not so many: In the end, some 500,000 people probably saw him during his visit, which is quite a lot in a country largely composed of pagans and Protestants.

And thus did Benedict's visit to Britain turn into an advertisement for religious freedom -- the freedom to abhor religion and the freedom to practice it. Much to everyone's surprise, including the Vatican's, raucous discussion of Catholicism turned out to be good for Catholicism and interesting for atheists, too. The true aging theocrats -- in Saudi Arabia, in Iran -- should take note.

The 'Benedict bounce'

According to the Telegraph:

...[V]olunteers who have been manning the phones at the Catholic Enquiry Office received as many as 100 calls on Monday morning alone, just hours after Benedict returned to Italy.

Among those phoning was a Sikh woman, who said she had been moved by the first-ever state papal visit and wanted to find out how she could convert.

The church expects more calls to come in over the coming weeks, as happened in 1982 after John Paul II’s visit to the country.

“We have had some enquiries but it’s going to take some time,” a spokesman said.

Anna Arco: CV as example of 'empowered laity'

Writing at the Catholic Herald site, its features editor, Anna Arco, reflects on the Pope's call to the laity to take their place in the public square -- citing Catholic Voices as an example.

Dominic Burbidge: 'Rome hits home'

CV Dominic Burbidge writes at the Church Mouse blog:

Amidst the dizzying tumult of people and whirling show of flags, the Pope struck home with three points. First, faith and reason depend on each other like brothers. Throw away one and you lose the other; no one can be a brother on their own. In this country we are used to defining faith as blind acceptance. But this is an understanding lodged in a stereotype of the enlightenment somehow challenging the fundamentals of religion. The Pope sees faith in terms of the bringing together of different disciplines of reason into a unified whole—scientific certainty is not the only type of certainty. Faith follows the reasoned findings of the pure sciences, philosophy, history, sociology and theology and finds their points of unity. This is the faith that is inspiring, not just for religious but for the public at large.

Secondly, the Pope has joined forces with Newman on the fundamental importance of the respect for conscience. In Westminster Hall, where St Thomas More was sentenced for treason, Pope Benedict affirmed how “the great English scholar and statesman ... is admired by believers and non-believers alike for the integrity with which he followed his conscience, even at the cost of displeasing the sovereign whose ‘good servant’ he was, because he chose to serve God first.”

This was not the Pope highlighting grievance with Henry VIII but a rallying call to Brits throughout the country. Conscience in public life is being shut out. From issues of embryonic stem cell research to euthanasia to homosexual adoption, legislators are convinced: there is no right to stand up against the license of individuals to do as they see fit. Pope Benedict joins voices with Newman and complains: “there are those who argue—paradoxically with the intention of eliminating discrimination—that Christians in public roles should be required at times to act against their conscience. These are 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.” The ability to act in conscience is essential for democracy, essential for the tolerance to other views of which our country is rightly proud.

And this deeper understanding of respect culminates in a third point Benedict and Newman have stressed: friendship. The theme of the papal visit: “heart speaks to heart” calls on Brits to value their personal relationship with each other and their personal relationship with God. In the bedroom chapel of Newman in Birmingham, pictures of his friends lined the wall so that he could turn and pray for them during Mass—his very own facebook. And so amidst the urban jungle of modern life, these two quiet gentlemen, Benedict and Newman, ask this third thing of us: that we may open our hearts to friends and God.