The Prime Minister and Rome
Prime Minister Gordon Brown, accompanied by his wife and children, has made his third visit to the Pope, his first since becoming Prime Minister (the previous two visits took place when he was Chancellor). The Vatican described the meeting as cordial and Mr Brown took with him not only a cross from Iona but a warm invitation for the Pope to visit all parts of the United Kingdom, possibly to mark the beatification of John Henry Newman, which the Pope is strongly promoting. A Vatican spokesman, after initial reports that no visit was envisaged, said that the Pope had welcomed the invitation “with great attention” and, although it had not yet been accepted, it would be taken into serious consideration.
Introducing a report of her interview with Mr Brown, Catherine Pepinster, in an article in the Roman Catholic Newspaper The Tablet, claims that “all the signs are that Gordon Brown is intent on being the first Prime Minister to welcome a pope to Downing Street”. Attributing to possible cynicism the idea that Mr Brown might be using his meeting with the Pope to augment his own declining popularity or as part of a political agenda, Pepinster suggests that what binds Brown and the Pope is a common commitment to the Millennium Development Goals. As he anticipates the G20 summit, “Brown wants influential backing for keeping the developing world on the agenda. The Pope’s influence on this has been proven.”
While she was at Downing Street, Catherine Pepinster seized on Mr Brown’s professed “regard for people with faith” and warm and adulatory words for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor to ask if he would consider putting the Cardinal in the House of Lords when he retired as Archbishop of Westminster. “Brown laughs, fiddles with his tie, and doesn’t rule it out. ‘These are things to be discussed at a later stage’”. From this incident came such increasingly-positive headlines as “Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor could be made a lord” (Daily Telegraph), “Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor set to be the first Roman Catholic bishop in Lords since 16th century” (The Times) and “Arise, Lord Murphy-O’Connor” (The American National Catholic Weekly).
The National Catholic Weekly’s Austen Ivereigh claims that the Cardinal “loves the idea. A life peerage, he thinks, would give him a platform with which to combat the shrinking of the Church’s voice in public life. . . . And he would relish the further recognition of Catholicism by the British establishment which began under his predecessor, Cardinal Hume. . . . And I’ve no
doubt that Gordon Brown would like to nominate him. . . . The PM badly needs to recapture Catholic sympathies lost by laws crushing Catholic adoption agencies and allowing for animal-human hybrid embryos.” Iverleigh assumes that the supposed Roman Canon Law prohibition on clerics sharing in the exercise of civil power could be got round if the Pope approved and that there would be no obstacle in the British Constitution as it would be the individual rather than the office that would merit the title and he would be a “lord temporal” rather than a “lord spiritual”.
In his interview with Catherine Pepinster, the Prime Minister said that “faith and religion remain at the centre of our public life. Christian heritage is absolutely crucial to it.” It is a sign of the delusion which has taken possession of our rulers and people that a man who has acquiesced in, participated in or promoted a great variety of what has been described as the most anti-Christian legislation in modern British history, and who is obviously oblivious to the difference between the Christianity which is still at the heart of our Constitution and the religion represented by the Vatican and by the Cardinal, can speak as he does of the crucial nature of our Christian heritage.
The Pope, however honeyed his words may be, claims to be “his Holiness” and demands the allegiance of monarchs and nations. This cardinal does not think that “genuine Christianity” obliges one to believe “that the biblical stories of Creation as described in the Book of Genesis are literally true”; his “genuine Christianity” is that from which the Reformation delivered the United Kingdom. And this Prime Minister’s religion is a social gospel divorced from “the glorious gospel of the blessed God”. But, given the deceptive power of sin, it should not surprise us that they can all fraternise, each aiming for what he can get out of it for himself and his own ideology.
Looking around our society we see that ancient heresies and alien religions are taking centre stage as the “moral conscience” of the nation, that government legislation is rapidly destroying the basic morality nurtured by our Christian heritage, and that the liberty to “live soberly, righteously and godly, in this present world” (Titus 2:12) is being eroded, initially in public life and daily occupations, and that no regard is had to the hand of God in the troubles coming upon our nation. “Our sins testify against us . . . in transgressing and lying against the Lord, and departing away from our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood. And judgement is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter. Yea, truth faileth; and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey: and the Lord saw it, and it displeased Him that there was no judgement” (Is 59:12-15). May it yet be as was prophesied in these days by Isaiah: “When
the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him” (59:19).
HMC