POPE’S VISIT WELCOMED BY MOST CHURCH LEADERS

Pope urges Britain to bring God back into public life

Pope Benedict XVl seized every opportunity during his visit to drive home a challenge to return Christian values to ‘the public square’. In his address before the Queen at Holy Rood Palace, he attacked the ‘more aggressive forms of secularism’ that ‘no longer value or even tolerate’ Christian values. Then, before around 65,000 Catholics in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, he warned against ‘some who now seek to exclude religious belief from public discourse or privatise it or even paint it as a threat to equality and liberty’. When he addressed members of both Houses of Parliament at Westminster Hal, where the Catholic martyr St Thomas More was tried and sentenced for treason, he returned to the same theme and appealed for a reconciliation between the demands of everyday life and the call of God.

Pontiff makes appeals to wavering young and non-Catholics

The Pope attempted to make his message an inclusive one, aimed at the young facing worldly pressures and at non-Catholics. Speaking to the young people among the crowd at Bellahouston Park, he said, ‘drugs, money, sex, pornography, alcohol, which the world tells you will bring happiness … are destructive and divisive.’ Then  the Pope reminded 4,000 children at the ‘Big Assembly’ in Twickenham that there are limitations to science and to celebrity. 

In an effort to reach out to non-Catholic Christians, he spoke of ‘our common Christian heritage’ and referred to anniversaries of the Scottish Reformation Parliament, and the World Missionary Conference which marked ‘the birth of the ecumenical movement’. 

Earlier, The Times spoke to Muslim representatives who were to meet the Pope.  Dr Musharraf Hussain, co-chair of the national Christian Muslim Forum, said he hoped the Pope’s visit will increase attention to ‘the virtues of kindness, tolerance, patience and generosity and the crucial role religion can play in improving the moral and social health of society’.

Pope receives near-universal welcome from church leaders

Leaders of Britain’s largest denominations and church groupings have welcomed the visit of Pope Benedict XVl. The Presidents of Churches Together in England, Archbishops Rowan Williams and Vincent Nichols and Salvation Army Commissioner Betty Matear, voiced the hope that his four-day tour would be ‘a source of encouragement to all England’s churches’. Representing both denominational and independent churches, the Evangelical Alliance gave special backing to the Pope’s campaigning stance against secularism. ‘While not all Christians share the Pope’s or the Catholic Church’s stances on certain issues, we should welcome his visit for the sake of fighting for religious liberty,’ Steve Clifford, General Director of the Alliance, said. Conservative Evangelical paper Evangelicals Now was cooler, however, offering a briefing on ‘how Catholicism differs from the biblical gospel’.