The attacks on the Pope's UK visit commence

Edinburgh - I took ill at Mass on Sunday, and my parish priest phoned to see what had happened, to arrange to give me my Pilgrim Pack and to give me the latest papal visit update.

“There’s no bus,” he said.

“What do you mean, there’s no bus?”

“There’s no bus. It’s a train. You have to go to Waverley Station and take a train to Glasgow.”

He came by in his car with my Pilgrim Pack and a letter addressed to me, my Latin Mass community’s Pilgrim #9. There’s a song title in there somewhere.

The letter is from Stagecoach West Scotland and has a picture of a bus on it. However, it reads, “Your travel has been arranged by train. You will need to meet your pilgrim group at Edinburgh Waverley where your pilgrim leader will provide you with your Pilgrim Pack. Your wristband will entitle you to travel on your allotted train when presented with this letter and must be shown to ScotRail staff when requested. This will then entitle you to a return trip to Bellahouston Park.”

As I already have my Pilgrim Pack, not even this letter is entirely accurate. Really, the papal visit to the UK has shattered my belief in mass communication.

I imagine that there have been other state visits in the UK since I moved here, but I cannot think of one that has resulted in so much media fuss, let alone a documentary on why the state visitor is a toad. Peter Tatchell’s long-awaited documentary The Trouble with the Pope aired twice last night, and I watched it twice. I had to watch it twice, because my husband yelled at the television so much, I did not hear everything that was said the first time.

Although deeply distressing, as an exercise in anti-Catholic propaganda it was riveting. Benedict XVI’s teachings, said Tatchell, a strained, cadaverous man in his 50s, were blighting the lives of millions. He cut to an interview with an elderly Englishwoman who had been raped by an English priest as a child. Nice appeal to reason there, Peter.  

Tatchell accused Benedict of having covered up sexual abuse, and then examined his supposed transformation from a good liberal to a bad conservative. Assisting him in these investigations was Hans Kung, whose antipathy to Benedict is so well-known that Mark and I giggled when he appeared. Tatchell then trotted out the Society of St. Pius X Bishop Williamson's Holocaust denial scandal and had footage of himself taken in Dachau before going to the Philippines to ring his hands over an impoverished, devoutly Catholic married woman with eight children. Then it was back to Britain to talk to people about the Pope’s cruel views against embryonic experimentation. Tatchell concluded, “This is not a Pope we should be welcoming to Britain.”

The bishop of Paisley has said this documentary shows Tatchell knows “next to nothing about the real nature and mission of the Catholic Church.” When it was over, I wondered what work was going to be like for openly Catholic Britons this morning.