The headline is alarmist - the visit will take place, of course, but organizational and financial problems raise major concerns.
The papal visit is in jeopardy
Turmoil behind the scenes in preparing for Benedict XVI’s keenly awaited visit to Britain —
and how the trip has been hijacked by a Blairite cadre.
by Damian Thompson
Issue of 02 June 2010
Last week, the Catholic Archbishops of England and Wales were summoned to a private meeting in London where they were given astonishing news about Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain.
The pontiff is due in four months’ time (16-19 September), yet preparations were going badly wrong. Some of the major venues, while announced, had still not been booked. And worse, the Church’s share of the cost of the four-day trip had veered wildly out of control, from £7 million to a figure nearer £14 million.
They later concluded that the centrepiece — an open-air Mass at Coventry airport — was probably going to have to be cancelled. It was a disaster.
There were ‘gasps from the archbishops’, I’m told. This was the Mass at which the Pope would beatify John Henry Newman. The organiser of the visit, Monsignor Andrew Summersgill, outlined their backup plan: hold the Mass in St Mary’s College, Oscott, a sprawling, clumsily modernised neo-Gothic seminary near Sutton Coldfield that Benedict is scheduled to visit anyway. ‘We can blame the change of plan on the era of austerity’ was the proposed excuse.
Crucially, only 10,000 worshippers could be accommodated at Oscott. Coventry airport can take 200,000 — a figure which is actually much smaller than the number of people who want to attend the beatification of Newman.
The archbishops at the meeting immediately grasped the implications of this. They had already collected money for the Coventry Mass — how would they explain that it had been cancelled?
Relations between the members of the team organising the papal visit were tense enough before this disaster. Mgr Summersgill is something of a divisive figure — regarded by his critics as an ambitious, mitre-hungry protégé of the previous Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.
Sources close to Archbishop Vincent Nichols, his successor, say he had never wanted Mgr Summersgill to take charge of the papal visit. He certainly did not want the task he had last week: to inform the Vatican that the budget had spun out of control and that the centrepiece of the visit — the Mass at Coventry — might have to be cancelled.
The Vatican’s response was straightforward. No, the Pope would not beatify Cardinal Newman — one of his spiritual heroes — at a cut-price ceremony in an old seminary. It must be a full open-air Mass at a major venue like Coventry, Archbishop Nichols was told. Sort it out. How he will do so is a mystery. Meanwhile, any reference to Coventry has mysteriously vanished from the papal visit website.
Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain was always intended to be on a smaller scale than that of John Paul II in 1982. But the diplomatic, political and logistical problems associated with it are far greater. For various diplomatic reasons, the last Pope came to Britain on a private visit: Benedict XVI is doing so as a head of state.
Accordingly, the British government will pay for aspects of his visit that are not specifically Catholic. A draft itinerary of his visit, seen by The Spectator, includes an audience with the Queen at Holyrood House, Edinburgh, and an 8.15 p.m. state banquet in his honour hosted by the Prime Minister at Lancaster House — which, bizarrely, the Pope is not expected to attend, presumably because, at 83, he might find it exhausting.
[No, Thomspon should know better. it is simply that the Pope, whoever he is, never ever attends a public banquet! The White House gave a state dinner in honor of Benedict XVI in April 2008 and did so for his entourage knowing that he would not be in attendance.]
The Papal visit also coincides with much public indignation at the Church’s role in protecting paedophile priests. The authors Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens would like to see the Pope arrested for his role in covering up the abuse.
There has also been resentment over the £7 million of taxpayers’ money that will pay for the visit — but at least that sum has not increased since the non-Catholic parts of the Pope’s itinerary were confirmed earlier this year.
It is the part of the visit run by the Church which is running into danger. The question facing the archbishops is how on earth the Church got its own sums badly wrong.
The explanation, according to independent sources — one of them in Rome and a long-time supporter of the former Cardinal Ratzinger — is that the planning has been dangerously haphazard.
The venues have been publicly announced but, as late as last week, Summersgill’s team had not finalised arrangements for the two big Catholic papal events in England: a vigil of prayer in Hyde Park on Saturday evening and the Sunday morning Beatification Mass at Coventry airport. Both have been widely publicised.
But not all the contracts have been signed. ‘The Hyde Park event has not been confirmed,’ says a spokeswoman for the Royal Parks.
Meanwhile, Patriot Aerospace, the company that bought Coventry airport in April, is unhappy that, thanks to a previous agreement, it has inherited a five-day closure during the papal visit for which it will receive no compensation. (The Church originally set aside £1.3 million for Coventry, but that was to meet its own costs for staging the event, which are likely to be far higher.)
It’s hard to think of a surer recipe for pushing up expenditure than announcing venues before properly securing them. The miscalculation is all the more mystifying when one considers the identity of Summersgill’s chief adviser and co-ordinator, a former 10 Downing Street media officer called Magi Cleaver. And this is where the mystery deepens.
Ms Cleaver’s role in the Pope’s visit is pivotal — and in inverse proportion to her profile. She has brought on board an events company called WRG, a Manchester-based firm used extensively by Tony Blair during his premiership. It has a reputation as being very good, but also very expensive. In an earlier incarnation, it organised the handover of Hong Kong to China; it was event manager for the whole G20 Summit in London last year.
To say that Ms Cleaver keeps a low profile is putting it mildly. She makes fleeting appearances in Alastair Campbell’s autobiography as a Foreign Office employee seconded to No. 10; this week her name was nowhere to be found on the papal visit website.
In the words of a Catholic source, ‘She remains very much beneath the radar. It’s unclear as to whether she’s a practising Catholic. But she’s still good friends with the Blairs, particularly Cherie.’
Ms Cleaver has worked as media co-ordinator for Vital Voices, a stridently PC women’s charity that supports the provision of abortion and contraception services in the developing world.
Cleaver’s closeness to the Blairs is important, given that the key player on the secular side of the papal visit, Francis Campbell, Britain’s first Catholic ambassador to the Holy See, is also very friendly with the Blairs. Indeed, the former PM secured his appointment in order to facilitate Benedict’s visit.
Campbell is charming, kind-hearted and (as I can vouch from conversations with him) theologically literate to a high degree. He is not to blame for the Church’s mishandling of the costs of the visit.
But his presence at the heart of the enterprise has reinforced suspicions in Rome that Benedict XVI is unwittingly being caught up in a Blairite publicity stunt bearing the fingerprints of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.
For example, the Foreign Office document officially announcing the Pope’s visit describes it as ‘an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen ties between the UK and the Holy See on global action to tackle poverty and climate change, as well as the important role of faith groups in creating strong communities’.
This is, unmistakably, the language of Blair’s Faith Foundation, with which the Catholic Church in England and Wales worked closely during Summersgill’s tenure at Eccleston Square: Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor acted as an adviser to it, and would have joined its board had the Pope not stopped him.
Parts of the itinerary drawn up for the Pope also read like extracts from a Tony Blair Foundation conference. There are numerous meetings with non-Catholics and ‘People of Faith’;
there is no sign of any visits to a hospice, crisis pregnancy centre or adoption agency which might take the Pope into areas of Catholic teaching from which the Blairs have publicly dissented.
These matters are glossed over, just as they were when Mr Blair was discreetly received into the Catholic Church by his friend Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor without being asked to disavow his support for abortion.
Such sleight of hand might annoy any Pope. Yet it is particularly inappropriate for Benedict XVI, given his disdain for the Blairite strand of Catholicism-lite. For months, there have been fears in Rome that the visit to Britain was being hijacked. But there was little anyone could do, given the power dynamics involved.
The Catholic Church is far less centralised than many realise, and in England a lot of power still rests with a secretive ‘magic circle’ that includes Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, Andrew Summersgill, the more liberal diocesan bishops and lay allies such as Francis Campbell and, until recently, Blair himself.
Organisationally, this tightly knit group is reminiscent of the New Labour project to which the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales gave such gushing support. Even now, the hierarchy can be regarded as one of the last bastions of Blairite patronage and back-slapping.
To this day, we do not know who appointed Cleaver. What we do know, however, is that the costings in the bishops’ official fundraising document, which predicted that the final bill would be £6.75 million, are now a woeful underestimate.
A spokesman for the Catholic Church told
The Spectator as we went to press: "The final programme is not confirmed yet. Even going back to the launch of the visit with the minister and the cardinal, what was expressed at that stage were the hopes of what would happen. We’re still working on it. All venues are subject to confirmation — the final itinerary will be fixed in July. Progress is being made quickly."
But no one else in the Church, it is fair to say, believes that progress has been quick; very much the opposite. And it is this sluggishness and lack of transparency which will leave priests throughout the country desperately trying to explain to parishioners why their money is going down the drain.
‘Why give this information to you?’ says one of our sources.
‘Because this papal visit is heading for the rocks, the two people in charge — Summersgill and Cleaver — are clearly out of their depth. Our parishioners will now have to foot the bill for their incompetence — and Pope Benedict deserves so much better. Without public scrutiny, things can’t be turned around. Enough is enough. Let sunlight be the best disinfectant.’
My initial reaction when Thompson first spelled out the gist of this article in his Daily Telegraph blog was that it seemed counter-productive to air out all these internal problems in public - and that they had to be sorted out internally - but I got around to the conclusion that it was intended as a cry of outrage and an appeal for something to be done before it all turns out to be disastrous! As Thompson's source puts it so well in the last paragraph.
One prays for the intercession of patrons of desperate causes like St. Jude Thaddeus and St. Rita of Cascia and the illumination of the Holy Spirit for all concerned.
I was focused on the Cyprus visit this weekend, but it turns out there's a rejoinder to Thompson's article, which, unbecoming cattiness aside, makes a few good points. Austin Ivereigh was a spokesman for Cardinal Murphy O'Connor when he was Aechbishop of Westminster and is on the panel of Catholic writers recruited to 'push' the papal visit in the UK media.
Is Pope Benedict's UK visit
really in trouble?
by AUSTEN IVEREIGH
June 5, 2010
It all seemed to be going so well. The itinerary was agreed following a Vatican delegation in January; the costs were estimated, and the fundraising got underway.
But now, according to a blistering article in the
Spectator and reports in the
Daily Telegraph, Pope Benedict XVI's September 16-18 visit to the UK is in "disarray" or even in "jeopardy" because of escalating costs.
The two major public events of the visit -- an open-air event in Hyde Park and the beatification ceremony of Cardinal Newman at Coventry Airport -- are no longer listed on the official papal visit website amid speculation that they will need to be abandoned in favour of small-scale, cheaper venues.
Catholics are alarmed, and want to know the truth. It hasn't been easy to find out. On Thursday, when the
Spectator article appeared,
the Catholic Church in Scotland issued the soothing statement that north of the border the plans were unchanged [Thank God for that - the Pope will have his Mass in Bellahouston Park, after all, and God bless the Church of Scotland!]
But the Church of England and Wales seemed only to confirm the speculation by going silent until eventually issuing a statement that the program was unconfirmed -- and would remain so until next month.
The author of the
Spectator article is a well-known conservative Catholic polemicist whose
feline, toxic, and often manic blog posts are relished principally for entertainment rather than enlightenment.
They are a more reliable guide to his fixations -- the superiority of pre-conciliar liturgy, the sell-out of modern Catholic bishops to liberalism, the perils of Islam -- than to what is really going on in the Church.
[WHOA! Who is being 'feline', i.e., catty and clawish, here???? In fact I would use a more appropriate metaphor for it - it's applied to humans but I don't want to get into Ivereigh's mindset! I hold no brief for Thompson, but to Ivereigh's hostility to him could have been couched in a more Christian manner. As it is, he devotes half this item to an attack on Thompson rather than getting to his point right away. ]
But it would be a mistake to discount the story altogether merely because it is refracted through an unusually distorted lens.
Thompson is the go-to journalist for disgruntled Catholic conservatives, including many priests and at least one bishop, who regularly use him to air their anxieties.
"Let sunlight be the best disinfectant", his source -- Thompson describes him as "one of his sources", making out that there are many; but that is a journalistic device to protect a principal informant -- says at the end of his article, justifying why he has given him so much information.
What is true in this story is buried under the usual fog of Thompson fixations and exaggerations. To what he calls the "secretive Magic Circle" of liberals who he thinks runs the British Catholic Church he adds here a "Blairite cabal" -- people close to the former prime minister and his Faith Foundation who have been influential in bringing about the visit, and then, bizarrely, links the two.
The Catholic hierarchy of England and Wales, he claims, "can be regarded as one of the last bastions of Blairite patronage and back-slapping".
Paranoid nonsense aside, it is true that the papal trip is having to be re-negotiated -- with a new body of government officials. And it is true that it is not as fixed as it was even a month ago. There have been obstacles and unanticipated problems -- the papal nuncio, for example, is seriously ill.
But the principal reason is the one that appears nowhere in Thompson's article (doubtless because it's a boring one). The UK has a new Government. The Conservative-Liberal coalition has a very different mindset to the previous Labour government, and is promising, as all new administrations do, a fresh start.
The state visit to the UK of Pope Benedict was promoted and agreed in principle under Tony Blair and finalized with enthusiasm by his successor, Gordon Brown. That has implications for September's visit. The Foreign Office under its new minister, William Hague, would doubtless never have agreed to the visit's purpose as "to strengthen ties between the UK and the Holy See on global action to tackle poverty and climate change".
The new government has yet to make the papal visit its own; that is one element of uncertainty.
The other is that the new Government has ordered a review of public expenditure -- and that includes, necessarily, Pope Benedict's state visit. The organisers have found themselves having to justify to a new set of public officials the public costs of the state element of Pope Benedict's itinerary, and having to negotiate hard to ensure that the Church is not burdened with much higher costs than the estimated £6.75m which, under the previous Government, the Church agreed to contribute as its share of the estimated £15m total.
Thompson says that the £6.75m figure is "a woeful underestimate"; but the papal visit organisers are committed to ensuring that that sum does not increase. The costs of Pope John Paul II's 1982 visit are still being paid off by the Church of England and Wales. The organisers do not want to see the same happening again.
I understand that some of the negotiations have involved pedantic discussions about the points at which Pope Benedict ceases, as it were, to be a state visitor, and becomes "a pastor" -- and who (state or Church) therefore bears the cost. These discussions are never easy; and many are having to be held all over again with a new set of political authorities.
There are similar complications with Coventry council -- the local authority of the area where the Newman beatification is to take place. Because the council's makeup changed at the 6 May elections, its new officials are examining the contracts which they have inherited.
Until these negotiations reach a resolution, neither the Hyde Park nor the Coventry events can be finalised and confirmed -- nor the numbers attending either event (assuming they still happen, which few doubt they will).
Thompson accuses the organisers of mismanagement: "It's hard to think of a surer recipe for pushing up expenditure than announcing venues before properly securing them", he says. What he doesn't point out is that trying to claim to a new government that agreements with a previous one are fixed and unnegotiable would be extremely bad manners -- and politically unintelligent.
What is needed now is a champion of the papal visit trusted by the new Government who can smoothe the negotiations between the organisers and the Foreign Office.
Enter Lord Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong and European commissioner, who -- the
Telegraph reveals -- will work with teams from both the Church and the Foreign Office to keep the visit on track.
Lord Patten is a Conservative, and close to the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols. It is an inspired choice -- which even Thompson (who tries to spin him as a member of the "Magic Circle") accepts.
It would be extremely sad if the two major public events of Pope Benedict's visit in September need to be cut back. Turnout is vital: it is how Catholics make visible their presence in the public square.
Many Catholics hope the visit's organisers -- Lord Patten -- make a vigorous case for a papal visit being treated differently from a rally or demonstration. Let us argue for 150,000 in Hyde Park and 200,000 in Coventry Airport.
The current message going out to Catholics -- asking them to contribute to events which they could be asked to stay away from -- is the wrong one, and it needs to be corrected as soon as possible.
It may, eventually, not be possible to agree to that kind of turnout -- security and cost obstacles may prove too great. But to claim, as Thompson does today, that the English and Welsh bishops regard the visit as an inconvenience they are anxious to get out of the way, is so patently off the wall it makes you question everything else he has written.
The organisers want a success. Catholics want a success. The Foreign Office wants a success.
And surely, God willing, it will be a success.
Of course, every person of good will wants the visit to be a success. But a success for the Pope and the Church, not for personal and institutional agenda seeking to ride on the Pope's visit though they are incompatible in some major points with Church teaching - as the Blair Foundation has!
Ivereigh does not address the objective fact that 'Blairites' are apparently in charge of the PR on the part of the Church of England and Wales.