Another Guardian letter

-- this time not from atheist celebrities, but (here) from "ordinary" Catholics -- including CV Neil D'Aguiar (photo).

We welcome His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to the UK as both head of state of the Holy See and as leader of the world's 1 billion Catholics and to the Catholic community of this country. We believe that his presence here comes at an urgent and pressing time, highlighting the trends in our country that serve only to denigrate human rights and human dignity. We support him wholeheartedly because in guarding the Deposit of Faith he:

Opposes the destruction of human life in the womb and values human life from conception to natural death

Opposes the trend towards refashioning the institution of marriage, thereby denigrating its inherent stability, rooted in the natural order, as being between one man and one woman.

Opposes the trend in the UK towards testing on human embryos, experimenting upon them and stripping the unborn of dignity, under a deceitful justification that this form of experimentation will yield medical benefits for mankind.

Has worked tirelessly to change the culture of the Catholic church to take very seriously allegations or incidences of child abuse, setting up child protection procedures and policies which now make the Catholic church the safest place for a child to be.

Promotes a vision of humanity which advocates a culture of life, stability, marriage, lifelong fidelity and love in which children are welcomed, rather than destroyed, in which human beings are open to new life, opposing vigorously a culture that treats the possibility of new life with contempt.

Upholds the innate, God-given dignity of all human beings regardless of their sexual orientation or social background and upholds the rights and dignity of society's most vulnerable, the poor, the starving, the outcasts, prisoners, the mentally ill and distressed, the disabled, elderly, sick and all those who are so often disregarded by the rest of society.

Robertson has picked the wrong target

Says Scott Stephens, religion and ethics editor of the Australian broadcaster ABC: 

My complaint against Geoffrey Robertson is that he has indicted the wrong man. He seems to have allowed himself to be swept along by the fashionable tide of anti-Catholic jingoism. Had he not, perhaps he would have recognised that, for all of his failings and inadequacies, no-one in the Catholic Church has done so much to secure justice and healing for victims of sexual abuse, to punish the guilty and the bishops who were complicit in their crimes, and to lead the Church into sincere penitence and renewal, than has Pope Benedict XVI.

Pope as pluralist

CV coordinator Austen Ivereigh in The Independent commenting on the Pope's Edinburgh speech:

In a diverse society the Catholic narrative, of course, is one among many, and cannot demand special privileges. Nor does it seek to. But it does seek expression, not just in newspaper columns or on airwaves, but in schools, charities, and homes for the elderly; and it asks for the right for these organisations to witness to the beliefs which drive and inspire those who run them and work for them, even when these appear to contradict contemporary mores. 

 An authentically pluralist society allows for this diversity – and the state encourages and protects it, balancing the various rights involved. To take a recent example, Catholic adoption agencies should have the right not to consider same-sex couples as adoptive parents if they believe (because of what they understand to be God's vision for humanity) that the man-woman binary model is in the best interests of children.

The pope visit controversies

CV Chris Morgan tackles them on BBC World Service 'Europe Today'.

A CV explains why he joined

CV Jim Carr in the Irish Catholic:

So why did I join up? Like many lay Catholics, I have often felt intense exasperation at the negative portrayal of the Church in mainstream media. Some of this is down to genuine misunderstanding by journalists. Some of it - less than some conspiracy theorists would have you believe - is due to wilful misconstrual of the Church's position. But, mainly, the bad publicity is simply down to the Church not doing a very good job of explaining its position. Sometimes, spokesmen (and, regrettably, it is mainly men) use arcane and abstruse language. Sometimes, the tone can seem harsh and hostile. Sometimes, there is, perhaps a reticence and timidity about articulating what, after all, is a really powerful and wonderful message. Catholic Voices, I felt, offered an exciting opportunity to address this situation.

Two things in particular attracted me to the project. The first was its vision of the Church. The Church is not conceived as the clergy or the hierarchy, but as the whole people of God. Of this, the laity form a vital and integral part. But the corollary of this vision is that the laity can't take the easy, lazy route of hurling in the ditch, lamenting the Church's plight, and bashing the bishops. They too, need to take responsibility for getting the message out.

The second attractive aspect of the project was its positive view of the media. Too often, Church communications founder on the misportrayal of journalists as villains and scoundrels. The media are not the enemy. They are not 'out to get us'. Most journalists take seriously their vocation to report honestly and fairly, to facilitate debate, and enable the national conversation.

Andrew Brown on what the Pope meant

in the Guardian here. 

 

We're not used to Germans coming here to talk about the war, so many people have jumped to entirely the wrong conclusion about Pope Benedict's attack on atheist extremism. He didn't mean us. He didn't even mean Richard Dawkins. He was talking about the Nazis, who, he said "wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live."

The atheist tyrannies of the 20th century did kill millions of people, many of them for their Christian beliefs. For Benedict, that is one of the main lessons of modern history. 

 [snip]

For him, a nation that turns away from God entirely has nothing to keep it from treating people as disposable means, rather than ends in themselves. The liberal appeal to reason, to choice, and to human rights doesn't go far enough. He believes in all three, but he thinks they must be derived from something else. That something else was once generally understood to be Christianity. If that is no longer true, Benedict believes we are all shrunken and impoverished: "Let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a 'reductive vision of the person and his destiny'."

So he believes that what gave Britain the strength to resist nazism was its long Christian heritage, in which the powerful and effective were animated by their faith. The two saints he name checked in his opening address were a king of England, Edward the Confessor, and a queen of Scotland, Saint Margaret. But the three 19th-century Christians, one diplomatically a Scot, were all Protestants: William Wilberforce, Florence Nightingale, and David Livingstone. All would have been shocked to see a pope of Rome received in state by the Queen.

But it is not their successors who are jumping up and down and shouting now. It is the representatives of what he calls "the more aggressive forms of secularism" which "no longer value or even tolerate … the traditional values and cultural expressions [of Christianity]". It is difficult to judge to what extent this is a large-scale movement. The astonishing variety and force of invective thrown at the pope and his church in much of the media over the last week must certainly, some of it, come from people who would like to drive religious faith out of public life. At the same time, it's hard not to suppose that in some of this the Roman Catholic church is standing as a proxy for Islam, which is certainly a great deal more unpopular.

According to the British Social Attitudes survey, 45% of us believe that religious diversity is harming Britain and more than half of irreligious Britons believe that "Britain is deeply divided on religious lines". So the pope's worries about multiculturalism – and for that matter Cardinal Kasper's – are by no means confined to a kooky minority.

Where secularists see religion as a divisive force, and their own beliefs as the self-evident and true base on which a healthy society can be built, Benedict sees that secularism itself can be challenged. Human rights are not self-evident. What rights we have depend on what kind of people that we think we are, and that is exactly the kind of question which social change and multiculturalism sharpen. It's not a question to which there is any agreed answer in Britain today.

Catholic Voices on France24 TV

(But it's in English.) CV coordinator Austen Ivereigh is interviewed in the report --- and filmed being interviewed by Sky News -- which is followed by comment on CV by Reuters religion editor Tom Heneghan (photo).