I just keep missing the Pope. I was in London for most of his visit to Cyprus. And now he has gone to the UK, just as I came back to Cyprus. This is not a problem as I have no desire to see Pope Benedict and would have nothing much to say to him if I ever met him. His advisor, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who dropped out of the visit at the last minute, is another matter.
When the Cardinal said that arriving in the UK was like ‘landing in a third-world country,’ I was really at a loss as to what he could possibly have meant by that? Did he mean when you fly into Heathrow you get the impression that you have arrived in a country with limited political development, civil liberties, no press freedom and lots of poverty? Because any of those attributes or a combination of them is what most people mean when they use the term ‘third-world’. I am guessing that what the Cardinal was talking about was seeing a diverse range of people from different ethnic backgrounds, (not all white), maybe even some Muslim women with their heads and faces covered.
What was this man on? Was he wrong? Is the Pope a catholic, you might as well ask? Britain is not poor (well there is a recession on but aside from that) or repressive or under-developed as the term implies. In fact one of the most developed things about Britain is its multi-culturalism and general celebration of diversity, religious, cultural or sexual. The Catholic Church may have distanced itself from Cardinal Kasper’s comments, but exactly how is the Church (or any church apart from possibly the Church of England, which some people don’t even count as a religion) progressive in terms of religious tolerance, the use of condoms, gay rights or women’s rights? Britain on the other hand is a progressive society, which is one of the things that makes it such an attractive place to live or even visit.
The last time I was in the UK passport office with my son, picking up a new passport, he asked me if you could get any passport there? But he was young and innocently assumed that many of the people in the passport office were not British. Because many signs and documents were written in languages other than English, he may have taken this as a clue that people were collecting passports from other countries. No, this is just Britain in all its multi-cultural glory, I told him. Look and learn before you go back to Cyprus, although even Cyprus is looking a bit more multi-cultural itself these days. Britishness is essentially characterised by a diverse range of cultures and identities.
TB (my hero) says in the introduction to his autobiography that he wanted us ‘to be a nation proud of being today a land of many cultures and faiths, breaking ground against prejudice of any sort….’ And I think we probably can be, whatever Cardinal Kasper says.
