Roger Cohen: A Pope in a Schismatic Isle
[Roger Cohen is a columnist for the NYT.]
...Freud might have questioned the wisdom of young Henry wedding a dead sibling’s spouse six years his senior. But the match had dynastic merits. It endured through several infant deaths and stillborn children — including the male heirs Henry craved — before the king sought a divorce from Pope Clement VII, was denied, and, in 1534, severed relations with the Roman Catholic Church.
This was a divorce row that did not blow over.
Since 1534 there had been no state papal visit to Britain, a 476-year lacuna that ended Thursday with the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI. (Pope John Paul II made a pastoral visit in 1982.) Seldom has a long-delayed journey been so ill-timed.
Benedict has not been received with open arms. It’s not just historical distaste for popery, or the cost to cash-strapped taxpayers, it’s far deeper. Britain would have done well to heed tradition and deny the honor of a state visit to this pope, a blunder-prone spiritual leader of rigid intellect and uncommunicative soul, too remote to heal a church in crisis.
He arrived as — after the United States, after Ireland, after the Netherlands, after Austria, after his native Germany — Belgium finds itself convulsed by a scandal over repeated sexual abuse by priests. A report released last week revealed the extent of the molestations and suggested 13 suicides had resulted from them....
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...Freud might have questioned the wisdom of young Henry wedding a dead sibling’s spouse six years his senior. But the match had dynastic merits. It endured through several infant deaths and stillborn children — including the male heirs Henry craved — before the king sought a divorce from Pope Clement VII, was denied, and, in 1534, severed relations with the Roman Catholic Church.
This was a divorce row that did not blow over.
Since 1534 there had been no state papal visit to Britain, a 476-year lacuna that ended Thursday with the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI. (Pope John Paul II made a pastoral visit in 1982.) Seldom has a long-delayed journey been so ill-timed.
Benedict has not been received with open arms. It’s not just historical distaste for popery, or the cost to cash-strapped taxpayers, it’s far deeper. Britain would have done well to heed tradition and deny the honor of a state visit to this pope, a blunder-prone spiritual leader of rigid intellect and uncommunicative soul, too remote to heal a church in crisis.
He arrived as — after the United States, after Ireland, after the Netherlands, after Austria, after his native Germany — Belgium finds itself convulsed by a scandal over repeated sexual abuse by priests. A report released last week revealed the extent of the molestations and suggested 13 suicides had resulted from them....