Will the Pope come here?
Wilfred De'Ath
High summer doldrums in Archbishop's House, Westminster. Waiting in the cavernous entrance chamber, furnished with that curious absence of good taste so characteristic of Catholic institutions, I can hear the distant, raucous laughter of priests in smokefilled rooms. (Catholic priests tend to smoke a good deal.) Extremely small Irish ladies push around trollies laden with tea-cups. Somewhere up in the attic, no doubt, Cardinal Hume is fingering his rosary and praying for the return to health of the Holy Father. . .
Monsignor Ralph Brown, national coordinator for Pope John Paul's proposed visit to Britain in 1982, comes out to greet me wearing a white summer jacket. He is smoking, too. A Vicar-General of the Westminster archdiocese and an ecclesiatical lawyer of repute, he seems an oddly uncharismatic choice for such an important and difficult job.
'The visit is definitely on,' he says, feigning a certainty which I am convinced he does not feel. 'It will be as big an event as the Royal Wedding — bigger even, because it will go on that much longer.' I fail to see how he can be so sure. Apart from the matter of the Holy Father's physical strength — the latest bulletin from the Policlinic° Agostino Gemelli, published in full in the current issue of The Tablet, is by no means reassuring, speaking as it does of the unpredictable nature of the viral disease from which he is now suffering — there is the small matter of dates. The Catholic bishops of England, Scotland and Wales have proposed 28 May till 2 June, 1982, but the Holy See, typically,will go no further than to say that these 'are not inconvenient' to the Holy Father. Really, it is all very much up in the air and Mgr Brown knows it.
It is not easy to plan ahead in an atmosphere of such uncertainty. And an enormous amount of planning is involved. The Catholic Church has proposed a threepart scheme of pastoral and spiritual preparation for the Papal visit, to begin with the season of Advent later this year. As things stand, December may well come upon us with no more certainty than we have now: only the prospect of an enormous sense of anticlimax. However, one can see Mgr Brown's dilemma. For the moment, he must proceed on the basis that the visit is actually going to take place.
Mgr Brown has retained the International Management Group, headed by the notoriously raffish Mark McCormack, to cope with the commercial aspects of the Papal visit — publications, recordings, commemorative items. Some of his critics, Catholic and non-Catholic, have seen this as the most ghastly mistake: the Church making money out of ecclesiastical tat. 'But what were we to do?' the Monsignor asks me with a harassed shrug. 'We are children in these matters, after all. A great deal of money is going to be made out of the visit by certain parties and it is only right that we, the Church, should get some of it. It is costing us about £6 million as it is. These people — IMG — should know what they are doing.'
This strikes me as ingenuous. In electing to become clients of IMG, the Roman Catholic Church in Britain will find itself lying down with some pretty strange bed-fellows. What about security, I ask? 'We shall do everything we can. I have been very impressed by initial contacts with the police. They seem to think of everything.'
Where is the Holy Father actually going? 'He will land at Gatwick Airport at 9.30 on a Friday morning. He will come in his own plane, but we shall provide a plane from then on. That day, he will celebrate Mass in Richmond Park. It will be attended by one and a half million people and will be the largest Mass ever celebrated in this country.' (An architect, Ronald Tallon, has been made responsible for the design arrangements for his Mass. Mr Tallon designed the site for the Papal Mass in Phoenix Park, Dublin, in September 1979.) 'Still in the south, the Holy Father will pay visits to Southwark Catholic Cathedral and to Westminster Cathedral as well as to the East End of London and to St Joseph's Hospice for the Dying. He will, at the invitation of Archbishop Runcie, visit Canterbury and take part in an ecumenical service in the Cathedral. He will obviously meet all the heads of the Christian Churches while he is here ."Leaving the south, it is planned that he should visit the Midlands and celebrate another enormous Mass at Coventry Airport, then move on to tour Liverpool, then to the Manchester and York areas. He will next proceed to Scotland and meet the Scottish bishops and other church and civic leaders. He will then visit Wales and return direct from there to Rome.'
But, since this is meant to be chiefly a pastoral visit by the Holy Father to his own people, what will he be talking to them about? What issues will he discuss with his own priests? 'Reconciliation of the lapsed; pastoral visitation; mission; unemployment; liturgy; ecumenism; marriage and the family; violence in society.'
It all sounds marvellous, but will it ever happen? As Cardinal Hume said this week: 'We must never put undue strain on the Holy Father nor overtax his strength. In the light of all that has happened it seems obvious that we will have to prepare a wide range of options for his visit.' Quite so. Or might not a definite postponement to 1983 or 1984 be a better idea than a muchreduced visit from a Pope greatly diminished in health?
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