I disagree with many of his teachings. But it's those who oppose Pope Benedict XVI's visit who are the real bigots



When Pope Benedict XVI touches down in Edinburgh next Thursday at the start of a four-day state visit to Britain, he may be forgiven for thinking he is not particularly welcome.



The Devil himself could hardly have got a worse press.

For the first time in my memory, there has been constant coverage in parts of the media, especially the BBC, about the costs to the taxpayer of such a visit, put at some £10 million.

A humane man: Pope Benedict XVI has made errors in his position but is a man of sincerity

At a time of belt-tightening this expenditure is considered by some to be scandalous.

Yet I can’t recall many people querying the costs of previous state visits to Britain. President Jacob Zuma of South Africa is a misogynist polygamist, whose corrupt government is now bearing down on a free Press.

Very few complained that the red carpet was being rolled out for him, and the fine wines uncorked, when he came here in March.

Worse still, Pope Benedict is being treated in some quarters as though he were a war criminal.

In a newspaper article yesterday, the well-known Leftist barrister Geoffrey Robertson suggested that instead of offering him a state visit we should be preparing a legal case against him because he has not dealt with sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church as robustly as he should have.

In an even more extreme — if not lunatic — vein, the militant atheist and Christian-hater Richard Dawkins suggested a few months ago that he might orchestrate a ‘citizen’s arrest’ of Pope Benedict during his visit to Britain for ‘crimes against humanity’.

Mr Dawkins was only 37, and perhaps too young to contemplate a citizen’s arrest, when the blood-soaked tyrant President Nicolae Ceausescu made a state visit to Britain in 1978, staying at Buckingham Palace with the Queen. But I can’t remember anyone else advocating locking up Mr Ceausescu.

Many of the things being said and written about Pope Benedict XVI are not merely discourteous to an 83-year-old man who is leader of more than a billion Catholics in the world, not to mention six million in this country.

Pope John Paul II: Charismatic but his teachings on birth control and homosexuality were extremely conservative and controversial

They are also nasty, and reveal disturbing traits of intolerance among this country’s supposedly liberal intelligentsia.

Let me declare that I am not a Roman Catholic. If I am wholly honest, I suppose that, like many Englishmen brought up on tales of the Spanish Armada and the Roman Catholic Queen ‘Bloody Mary’, I retain a few traces of anti-Catholicism that are largely irrational.

More rationally, as an Anglican whose father was a clergyman in the Church of England, I resent the Roman Catholic view, promulgated as recently as 1896, that Anglican orders are invalid.



The Archbishop of Canterbury is by this definition little better than a witch doctor. As for the doctrine of ‘Papal Infallibility’, first proclaimed in 1870, that seems barmy.

Nor do I agree with some of the moral teachings of this Pope, or his charismatic predecessor, Pope John Paul II, on matters such as birth control or women priests or homosexuality, which Pope Benedict once described as a tendency towards an ‘intrinsic moral evil’, though he has on other occasions demonstrated some understanding for gays.

Despite these reservations, which will be shared in varying degrees by lots of people, including many Roman Catholics, I nonetheless acknowledge that Pope Benedict expounds what he believes is Christian doctrine in a courageous way.



Unlike many bishops in the Anglican Church, he does not bend to fashionable secular trends, and holds fast to beliefs which are those of the traditional Church. Isn’t that admirable?

And before he is dismissed as a fuddy-duddy ultra conservative, we should remember that he criticised the Anglo-American imbroglio in Iraq, and recently spoke out against the sudden forced expulsion of Roma gipsies by the French Government.



Whatever else, Pope Benedict is a humane man.

Militant atheist: Richard Dawkins has threatened to make a citizen's arrest of Pope Benedict XVI during his visit

As for the countless heinous cases of child abuse involving Catholic priests, it can certainly be argued that, like his predecessor, Pope Benedict was slow to grasp the severity and extent of the problem.



But despite ingenious attempts to implicate him in some way, there is no evidence at all that he condoned what took place.

I believe in the sincerity of his expressions of regret.

Here, surely, is a good, clever and holy man with whom we can disagree on some, or even many, issues.



But he is not a monster and child abuser to be vilified as though he has deliberately committed acts of evil.



In his newspaper article Geoffrey Robertson imagined the Pope ‘engaging in hate-preaching against homosexuals or allowing the Catholic Church to operate a worldwide sanctuary for child abusers’. Who is the extremist here?

I have been trying to puzzle out the sheer bloody mindedness and unreasonableness of some of the Pope’s critics.



In part it must arise from ancient feelings of fear and hatred about the Vatican and the Papacy which run very deep in this country for well-known historical reasons, and which I have owned up to sharing, albeit in a tiny degree.

But there is something else at work, even more intolerant. It is the voice of secular humanism.

I accept, of course, that lots of secular humanists are tolerant and reasonable people. But there is a hard-core which embraces and promotes atheism with the blind fervour of religious zealots.



Richard Dawkins is my prime exhibit, but there are many others.

Such people can just about put up with wishy-washy Anglican clerics who substitute fashionable secular platitudes for traditional beliefs, and often display a very faint faith in God.



What these zealots find detestable in Pope Benedict is not only his utter refusal to buy into their secular liberal beliefs, but also his power and effectiveness in sustaining an alternative, God-based moral system.

Parts of the BBC — the Today Programme on Radio 4, for example — offer the secularist zealots an ever-increasing platform from which to undermine Christian belief. Mr Dawkins is a great favourite.



So is a philosopher called Anthony Grayling, who campaigns against Christianity. He was at it again on the Today Programme yesterday morning.

It is difficult to disagree with Cardinal Keith O’Brien, leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, who recently accused the BBC of ‘a consistent anti-Christian bias’.



The Cardinal noted that the BBC — whose director-general Mark Thompson is, strangely, a Catholic — is broadcasting a programme on the eve of the Pope’s arrival called Trials Of A Pope. He suggested, rightly I am sure, that this will be a ‘hatchet job’.

Notwithstanding all the hatchet jobs that have been executed and others that are planned, Pope Benedict’s visit will probably make a deep impression on many people, including non-Christians.



We may not agree with everything he says, or even with his most fundamental beliefs. But his visit should be welcome because he is something rare in the modern world. A decent man of principle.