Roamer’s column

As Queen Elizabeth lay dying in March 1603, she was begged to take a little nourishment. She partook of a couple of spoonfuls of broth and no more. The Lord Admiral then suggested, so Evelyn Waugh informs readers in his book, Saint Edmund Campion Priest and Martyr, that she rest in bed rather than on the floor propped up by cushions; she reacted angrily, made references to nightmares.

“If you were in the habit of seeing such things in your bed as I do when in mine”, she told him, “you would not persuade me to go there”. She lay there for two weeks, was finally carried to bed where she died without saying another word. The Tudor dynasty had come to an end. England became a Protestant country, Catholicism a hunted religion.

Martyrdom awaited those who preached the faith. Campion, who had so impressed the Queen when she visited Oxford University in 1566, was hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in 1581. The roll call of martyrs was English Catholicism’s greatest hour. It would take more than 240 years of third-class citizenship for Catholics to be emancipated – but not fully. The road to full emancipation is not over; still, much has changed.

On Thursday, the second Queen Elizabeth will formally welcome Pope Benedict XVI on the first state visit of a Roman Pontiff to Britain’s shores. A descendant of a German House will speak unto a German – cor ad cor loquitur? – who, in his office, is no longer a German. He meets the Queen at Holyrood House – once the residence of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, until her execution by Good Queen Bess in 1587.

Later, the Pope will celebrate Mass for 100,000 people, then down to London, next day, for a punishing schedule during which weird groups may attempt to harass the Pope’s itinerary. Its focal point will be his beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, the Church’s greatest 19th century convert and, in the future, a

Doctor of the Church?

I imagine Benedict’s keynote speech will be delivered to parliamentarians and representatives of civil society at Westminster Hall, the place where Edmund

Campion and Thomas Moore were tried for treason and found guilty – the latter on the evidence of one, Master Rich, a perjurer; but if you cannot find a credible witness what can you do? After which, ecumenical evening prayers at Westminster Abbey.

Mass at Westminster Cathedral next morning, a prayer vigil at Hyde Park and on to Birmingham on the 19th for the beatification; a brief stop at Birmingham Oratory, a meeting with English and Welsh bishops – and back to Rome, where he starts to prepare for his journey to Spain, now vying to become the most secular country in Europe.

For some people nothing changes

Given such a tight schedule, it came as a surprise to some that The Daily Mirror spluttered: “The Pope has refused to broadcast on Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’ during his UK visit”, when journalistic decency, not always in ample supply, I grant you, should have indicated that he had not the time to offer one on Radio 4 when he was offering hundreds of them, anyway, during his four-day stay in Britain.

It is symptomatic of the times that Lord Patten, who took over the co-ordination of the visit from senior officials who had drafted a memo recommending the Pope be asked to open an abortion ward, felt he had to declare, publicly, that Britain’s reputation was at stake during the papal visit. The government, he said was determined to make a success of the visit, not least “out of determination to enhance the reputation of the United Kingdom because this will be an event followed by millions of people around the world”.

The homosexual activist Peter Tatchell declared that the Pope should be arrested when he arrived in the UK and prosecuted for “covering up sexual abuse” and there was talk of a “citizen’s arrest” being attempted. Recently, (ironically?) Tatchell proposed that the age of sexual consent be lowered to 14; bringing down the lower age, he maintains, is the best way to protect young people from abuse! Whom the gods destroy…

On the other side of the Atlantic we heard Maureen Dowd, from the Augean stables of The New York Times call for a “nun for pope”. And where religion has learned not to assume a role in science, atheist scientists continue to presume they have a God-given (ooops!) right to assume one in philosophy and metaphysics. So, back in Britain the scientist Stephen Hawking claims in his new book The Grand Design that God is not only dead; at no stage of Hawking’s book was He ever alive. Well, if Hawking says so.

Many hope some things will change

Two years ago, Cardinal Walter Kasper, at that time head of the Vatican’s ecumenical department addressed a working session of Anglican bishops at the Lambeth Conference and bravely called for a “new Oxford Movement”. This was the 19th century phenomenon that led to a number of prominent Anglican converts, many of them from Oxford and Cambridge, to Catholicism. The most famous was Newman.

It will not be the case, although with Pope Benedict one can never be sure, that he will make the same call when he meets the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and Anglican bishops; more likely that he will call on Britain to take a close look at itself, and to take pride once more in the Christianity that St Augustine brought over to her shores even as the so-called Dark Ages were preparing to descend over Europe.

Will he warn an agnostic Britain that a New Dark Age is threatening Europe and that the land of Augustine should consider whether it could light a candle and another and then another to roll back the gathering darkness? Or will this be a high calibre intellectual revisit of an address he gave to the Italian Senate as

Cardinal Ratzinger a year before he became Pope? Then he had warned:

“The complex problems left behind by Marxism continue to exist today. The loss of man’s primordial certainties about God, about himself, and about the universe – the loss of an awareness of intangible moral values – is still our problem… and it can lead to the self-destruction of European consciousness.” It is impossible, he had written in an earlier version of his talk, “not to notice a self-hatred in the Western world that is strange and can even be considered pathological”.

Ratzinger’s description of today’s Europe was almost merciless. “At the hour of its greatest success, seems hollow, as if it were internally paralysed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life, subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity. At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.

“Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as if they were taking something away from our lives. Children are seen as a liability rather than as a source of hope. There is a clear comparison between today’s situation and the decline of the Roman Empire. In its final days, Rome still functioned as a great historical framework, but in practice, it was already subsisting on models that were destined to fail. Its vital energy had been depleted”.

There is an echo here of something I read only yesterday, a quotation from that great historian Christopher Dawson published in Europe’s darkest hour, 1942, and cited in Archbishop Chaput’s book Render Unto Caesar. “This is the greatest misery of modern civilisation – that it has conquered the world by losing its own soul, and when its soul is lost, it must lose the world as well”. How prophetic.

For Europe the Pope entertains such fears, read each of its parts. Will he call on England, after praising her contribution to that civilisation, to move back from the brink where she and Europe are perilously perched? Perhaps he will ask the “angels” St Augustine once saw, to reset her destiny in the direction of life and human dignity, away from scepticism and debilitating relativism.

Hope for change

Newman’s beatification will likely provide a slightly firmer bridge for Anglicans and Catholics to navigate, one that has been, in part and to a greater or lesser extent, damaged by controversial decisions taken by a seriously divided Anglican Communion. Both will acknowledge Newman’s courageous, painful and saintly decades-long journey in search of truth towards an authentic conscience unrelated to subjectivist notions that lie at the root of relativism.

Pope Benedict may see it as a parallel task to encourage Britain to set its sights on the encouragement of a Christian humanism that will inform believer and non-believer alike – and, in a climate of hope, to experience once more the fruits of that Second Spring which this new saint did so much to bring about, a century-and-a-half ago.

P.S. EWTN is relaying the entire visit.