QUI ERIT DEINDE SANCTI PATRIS?

According to bookies, the front runner for the job of absolute ruler of the world's smallest country, and as Vicar of Christ and leader of the world's one billion plus Roman Catholics is the Italian Cardinal, Angelo Scola, Archbishop of Milan who is 71. Apparently (although I don't know how anyone would know) he received 50 votes of the 77 which are needed to clinch the job in the first round of voting. 

Other contenders are supposedly Brazilian Odillo Sherer, Archbishop of São Paulo , who is 63;  Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, also 63, and Marc Ouellet, from Québec, who is 69. They are rumoured to have received between 10 and 15 votes each.

One cardinal who isn't counting on getting the top job and moving to the Vatican any time soon is Roger Mahoney, whose ex-diocese of Los Angeles has just paid out $10 million in compensation for child abuse, all carried out by a priest whom Mahoney allowed to continue working with children, despite his knowing about the man's predilection for children. 

I reckon that had I been Mahoney, as well as retiring from overseeing my See, I would have declined to take part in the Conclave, [from which in any case, I would have thought him barred, due to his age (77)!]

Given the size of the Catholic population across the world, the influence that the Pope has in so many countries and the horrific recent history of child abuse and corruption, in particular in the Curia, the administrative heart of the Vatican City and the Church, (the reason many say that Pope (Emeritus) Benedictus XVI stood down) the choice of Pope is important to everyone, not just to Roman Catholics.

There are those who favour a return to an Italian Pope for the first time since 1978; but there are those who say that it would be more sensible to have a Pope from part of the world where the Church is growing, rather than one where it is in decline. Thus  African and South American candidates have been mentioned as possibilities for the first time. Some say the new Pope should be a preacher, some say an academic, some an administrator and tough manager. 

There will of course be many who remember that in 1978 there was a Pope who, it was rumoured, was shocked with the unholy doings of the Vatican Bank and allegedly had plans to investigate it. He died after 33 days in the papacy. 

I wondered if any of you have any ideas about who the next Pope should be and why. 

SOME OF MY

ON THE UK GOVERNMENT AND CAMERON'S STATE VISIT TO EDINBURGH

A few weeks ago the UK government warned that if Scotland were to break away from the UK, Spain would veto its membership of the European Union.  It provoked a furious rebuttal from the Spanish foreign ministry. (The argument about whether Scotland would want to join the EU, or indeed would NEED to join the EU aside.)


And now the UK government has managed to leave Cardinal Keith O'Brien, head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, off the list of invitees to be part of a delegation to the Vatican, whilst inviting the senior Cardinal in England, Vincent Nichols. 


When asked about what was a slight, both to Cardinal O'Brien and Scotland, the response of the UK government was to blame the Vatican, which was, they said, responsible for the invitations. 


The response from the Vatican was that this was untrue; it was the UK responsibility to decide upon the members of their delegation. Sayeeda Warsi who led the British, English group clearly forgot to tell Michael Moore, our man in England, that it was a British delegation. 


Warsi might not have known that there was a separate management structure for the Church  in Scotland, but the FCO, under whose auspices the trip to a foreign state comes, should have known.


Why do they lie about these things?


So much for all that sob story sentimental twaddle from the prime minister about Scotland being sooooo important to the UK.

Talking of which, Cameron came up to Edinburgh, and after his visit to a porridge factory... (I mean, talk about patronising. You can just see his English audience in the Home Counties laughing at that one; "It's all they make, darling, that and whisky. It's their staple diet, don't you know"...) he went to  a room with a view of the Castle... which was also a bit twee, and made a speech, during which he stood behind a lectern (presumably his), which sported the coat of arms of the Queen: The Queen of England that is. The Queen of Scots maybe the same person, but the coat of arms is different, as it would have to be, and as a PM or as an ex-PR, he should have known.


Sloppy, innit?


There are some great articles analysing the visit of his prime ministerness to our shores. If you want a cleverer analysis that you can hope to get from me, can I suggest James's article at Scot Goes Pop, Stephens's at SNmr, and for a good laugh and some serious stuff, Auldaquaintance.

WRONG RIGHTED...AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Well... it came and it went and it cost a fortune.... and of course the Duke of Edinburgh put his big clumping foot in it...

“Hello Ms Goldie. Are you wearing tartan knickers?” said old Phil, betraying a lack of something in his upbringing.

Displaying, in her turn, good humour and quick wit, Annabel replied: “I cannot possibly comment and even if I had, I could not possibly exhibit them.”

Smart old bird is our Annabel. She knows when not to display her undergarments. And I for one am not buying certain reports that she winked saucily at the Duke as she said it...

It's a thought though, that if any other man had said that to any other woman, he would have had his collar felt, spent a night in the pokey out at Saughton, and got himself 5 years on the sex offenders’ register.

However the Duke had to make do with yet another headline proving that, even after all these years, when he is let off the bosses leash for a few seconds, he’s just a dirty old sailor at heart... and Ms Goldie is surely only grateful that he managed not to say it in front of the Pope.

Meanwhile another octogenarian linked "atheist extremism" throughout Europe to Nazism, which was rich coming from an ex Hitler Youth in the form of Pope Benedictus XVI. Remembering that, despite all the Masses he is conducting, this is a State visit, meaning that he is here as the King Pontiff of a small Mediterranean State and thus the visit should be about politics and not religion, that was not the most diplomatic of starts.

To be fair, the good Cardinal Kaspar managed to start it off badly before the poor old Pope had left Vatican City by likening England to a third world country. So, to parody the song, things could only get better.....

Well, this time they did. The Pope was fed haggis, neeps and tatties for lunch, Susan Boyle gave him a blast of her powerful pipes, and the sun shone for him....

Which was just as well as the poor man had to do all this with just his wee white skull cap.

Was it a case of “and then his hat blew off”?

No, I don’t think so. It seems that whist the Pope's motocade was heading down from the Palace, this wee wuman was spotted running hell for leather (if you'll pardon the phrase!) away from the procession clutching a red hat which matched perfectly her red shoes, gloves and bag, and shouting, “Efter a’ thay years.... it's back...it’s mine... IT’S MINE..... as she disappeared down Mary King’s Close.....

No one we know, I suppose!?

Pics: Philip of Edinburgh; Annabel looking cross; His Holiness avec ... and sans said hat.

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......AND ALL THIS MONEY FOR ONE WEE HAT

I read in the Sunday Post this week (yes, I know it’s Thursday, but I’m a slow reader) that the estimated cost of security during the Pope’s visit to Scotland this autumn will be around £70 million.

Now that’s a lot of money in any language (especially if the wee man’s only coming here to give Sophia Pangloss her red hat back).

As this is a State Visit and the Pope is here by invitation of Her Majesty’s government (ie wee Spud) as Sovereign of the State of the Vatican City, we have to pick this bill up.

The security money, it seems, will come out of the Scottish government’s budget, despite the Scottish government having played no part in the invitation. And according to the article in the Post, the Scottish government says that it can’t afford it.

Now to be fair the Scottish government can easily afford £70 million pounds; it’s a lot, but in governmental terms it’s next to nothing, but at a time when pensioners are finding that their services have been cut, libraries are closing down, children’s services are being reduced etc, I think that Holyrood is quite right to say it can’t afford the money for a one day visit by a foreign head of state.

I’m not denying that this head of state may be important to a proportion of the Scottish population, and for those who feel that way his visit will be a huge event in their lives. The fact that I can’t see why, after all faith in God, is faith in God, not in a man in a long white garb, is of little relevance.

I’m also wondering who’s making the vast profit out of it. Who provides this security? As popular as the Pope will be with some people, he will be equally unpopular with others, I accept, particularly given his personal involvement in the scandals that have surrounded the Church, but £70 million... for one day?

The British Government invited the man on behalf of the British Queen. They should pay. And, as the Post suggests, it wouldn’t hurt if the obscenely wealthy Vatican City State were to put its hands in its pockets.

Alternatively Sophia could just nip over to Vatican on one of these cheap flights and get her hat back herself.

Pics: Sophia's hat (modeled by an elderly citizen of a small Mediterranean country), and an example of some of the Vatican's wealth that it might conside selling to pay for the Pope's security (in fact Michelangelo's Pietà which is in St Peter's Basillica, Vatican)

YET ANOTHER INQUIRY INTO THE IRISH CHURCH'S SHAME

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Emeritus Archbishop of Westminster, is going to head up a team of Catholics chosen by Pope Benedict, to investigate, yet again, how the Church in Ireland was able to cover up decades of sexual abuse by priests.

There have already been two inquiries and basically what they found was that in Ireland the Church was above the law, or indeed a law unto itself. I’m not sure that another inquiry, specially led by a priest who has himself been implicated in the cover ups, will be helpful or will in fact uncover anything that the previous inquiries by the Irish authorities has not.

Cardinal Murphy-O’Conner, when a bishop, was involved in appointing a paedophile priest to a job at Gatwick Airport, in which he would have contact with children. When the priest, Michael Hill, was jailed in 2002, victims sought Murphy-O’Conner’s resignation. He of course refused to go and instead issued an apology.

It seems that when senior people get it all wrong, and in this case seriously wrong, they issue apologies. When junior people make a mistake, they pay with their jobs, and sometimes their freedom.

In any case, I wonder if inaction on the part of the Vatican all these years will be seen to have been somehow mitigated by the amount of weeping, praying (instead of preying) and gnashing of teeth that has been seen to come from Rome in the recent past, since the horrors of what went on all over the world, and the complicity of senior clergy in hiding it, has become public knowledge.

Frankly I wonder that any senior clergy in, it seems, any country in the world, can walk about the streets with their heads held high.

Photographs: Cardinal Murphy-O'Conner; Pope Benedict

WHAT'S GOOD FOR PRIESTS ISN'T GOOD FOR FCO JUNIORS

The hypocrisy of the Vatican!

I feel I should apologise for blogging on the same subject twice in succession, but I had a quick glance at the papers this evening and I really began to wonder if we’d stepped back in time to All Fools’ Day.

It seems that the Vatican has taken the insulting proposals for the Pope’s visit very seriously and mutterings in Holy See are that the Pope may cancel his state visit to Scotland and England. Apparently the British Ambassador to the Vatican City State was summoned this afternoon to see the Secretary of State, the man in the Vatican who deals with Foreign Affairs and is the de facto Deputy Pope. The matter will now be discussed with the Pope himself.

It appears that this, on top of other matters such as Richard Dawkins’ threat to have the Pope arrested, persuaded officials at the Vatican, that acceptance of the invitation delivered by Jim Murphy on behalf of the Queen was a big mistake.

The Daily Telegraph reports that Senior Papal aides suggested the Foreign Office had not taken strong enough disciplinary action against those responsible for the document.

Now I’m not making excuses for the idiot employee who wrote this rubbish, but what was it that the FCO did to the guy? Oh yes. He was reprimanded and transferred to other duties.

Now then, what was it that these bishops did, sometimes with the good Cardinal Ratzinger’s knowledge when they discovered a priest had been abusing people in his care? Oh yes. They reprimanded him and transferred him to other duties.


See the connection there?

The only conclusion that I can draw from this is that a stupid, childish and disrespectful prank is, in the eyes of the Vatican, on the same level of severity as the hideous crime of child abuse. Would that be about right?

Or is it, to be totally honest, that anticipating an embarrassingly hostile reception when he landed in Edinburgh, and realising that he had only been invited as part of a pre election publicity stunt by the Labour Party, the Pope was desperately looking for a good excuse not to make the visit? And we handed him one on a plate.

Whatever, it’s not looking good for Spud.

Pics: Foreign Office and The Vatican

THE FCO ISN'T FIT FOR PURPOSE BUT IT HAS A NICE NEW LOGO

What in the name of...well... I suppose, in the name of God, do the staff in our Foreign and Commonwealth Office get to do with themselves all day?

Well for one thing changing the font on the FCO logo. Yes, for a mere £80 000 the FCO got consultants redesign the logo from the top to the bottom example.

We all have to make sacrifices because of the greed and stupidity of the financial sector and the government, all except the FCO, which needs a new logo. Desperately.

It’s the FCO’s new “brand” you see. I’m sure you’ll have guessed it, but if not, the new “brand” represents: Empowering; Insightful; Principled; Persuasive; Strategic; Intelligent. (You knew it all along.)

Right.

So, if they are intelligent, why on earth were they wasting their time... no, our time, with a brain storming (or I was once told by a council official “thought showering... as brain storming might be offensive to people who suffer from epilepsy”. Can you imagine the look I gave her?) on the subject of suitable activities for Pope Benedict’s state visit to the UK.

Some half wit wrote a report suggesting all manner of idiotic things like launching an eponymous condom brand, opening an abortion clinic, singing a charity song with the Queen and doing forward rolls with school children.

In fairness there was one very interesting proposal, that he spend the night in a council flat...why not? If he has come to see how his people live in this country, the palaces of the Cardinal Archbishops in Glasgow or London are not likely to give him any indications at all. And it included the suggestion that he should sack some “dodgy bishops”, with which I have a deal of sympathy.

But these two proposals aside, surely the rest of the document is some sort of joke. And in these straitened times, if we have staff with time to produce joke documents, then it is high time we lost them.

For the rest of us there is little time to joke, and frequently little to laugh about.

The British government has of course been fulsome in its apologies to the Vatican State.

The Bishop of Nottingham called the report appalling and Cardinal Renato Martino, former head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace said: “The British government has invited the Pope as its guest and he should be treated with respect. To make a mockery of his beliefs and the beliefs of millions of Catholics, not just in Britain but across the world, is very offensive indeed.”

Actually I agree with him. Right now I have no time at all for the Pope. It appears that he has covered up numerous cases of child abuse and has taken a light hand with others who have done the same thing. Saying he is sorry and weeping and praying may be considered to be justice enough in the Vatican State, but it sure as hell (literally) isn’t in Scotland. In my opinion the invitation to visit should be withdrawn until such time as we have a Pope unscarred by any association with this filthy crime.

However, I am also concerned that we are employing, presumably at considerable expense, Oxbridge educated (educated?) staff to write this drivel. And as punishment the writer has been transferred to other duties! Maybe he’ll be redesigning the logo, or weeping with the Pope.

Incidentally, this is the first ever state visit of a Pope to Scotland and England. Pope John-Paul II’s visit in 1982 was financed by the Vatican; this one is costing us millions.


Pics: Old Logo; New logo; Pope Benedict in a red hat

POSSIBLE SHADOW OVER POPE'S STATE VISIT TO SCOTLAND

The matter of abuse by priests of the Catholic Church is one which this blog has covered before. It is no secret how much I despise the way that people entrusted with care of kids, totally trusted by their parents, abused that trust.

Now the whole subject has moved up a notch if The Times is to be believed. It seems that the Pope himself has been involved in the cover up of at least one scandal.

It reports revelations that in the 1990s he, as Cardinal Ratzinger failed to defrock an American priest who molested hundreds of deaf boys, despite receiving letters from a number of American bishops pleading with him to act.

Internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to the Cardinal warning him that failure to act could embarrass the church, have been found.

The particular case involves the priest, Lawrence Murphy, who allegedly molested up to 200 pupils in their dormitories, on excursions and elsewhere.

Fr Murphy wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger begging for leniency. He said that he had already repented and was in poor health and wanted to live out the rest of his life in what he called the “dignity” of the priesthood. “Dignity”, after molesting 200 kids is a bit steep, but these people’s minds seem to work in funny ways.

The worrying thing for Scotland is that it appears that Viceroy Spud, on instructions for Gordon Brown, presumably with some hopes of gaining political advantage from the situation, went to Vatican City to invite His Holiness to make a state visit to Scotland. Further to that, His Holiness was pleased to accept the Queen’s invitation, and he will arrive at Edinburgh Airport on September 16, to be greeted by the Duke of Rothsay, and taken to Holyrood House to meet the Queen and the First Minister, and then be taken to Glasgow for an open-air Mass.

If it is shown that the Pope did in fact allow such a man to continue as a priest, to avoid the disgrace, and the civil law in Wisconsin, which would undoubtedly have meant prison, what kind of a reception will the people of Scotland show this man?

We are by and large a decent people. Adherents of his Church were always going to line the streets and wave the flags of Scotland and the Vatican State. But peoples of other faiths too would surely have welcomed him as a head of state and head of a Church. Mindful of the respect that it is normal to pay such a person, I wonder what ordinary Scots would feel about a man who hid the truth about an abuser of 200 kids? I know how I feel.

Is this yet another example of something Brown touches turning to dust.


Pictured: The Pope alone and with the Viceroy in St Peter's, Vatican.


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