After suggesting that coming to a secular Britain is like landing in a “third world” country, Cardinal Walter Kasper has withdrawn from the Pope’s visit to the UK, citing a “sudden illness.”
The Guardian reports:
One of the pope’s top advisers on his visit to England and Scotland has dropped out of his entourage following the publication of an interview in which he said that arriving in Britain “you sometimes think you’ve landed in a third world country”.
Benedict XVI’s spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, told the Guardian, however, that Cardinal Walter Kasper had withdrawn “for health reasons”.
He said the 77-year-old prelate’s absence from the papal party, which lands in Edinburgh tomorrow at the start of a four-day visit, “had absolutely nothing to do with anything else”.
Kasper, the Vatican’s leading expert on relations with the Church of England, made his remark after noting that Britain was a “secular, pluralistic” country.
Asked by the German news magazine, Focus, whether Christians were discriminated against in Britain, he replied: “Yes. Above all, an aggressive new atheism has spread through Britain. If, for example, you wear a cross on British Airways, you are discriminated against.”
Andrew Brown comments:
Kasper is normally one of the Vatican’s more diplomatic and emollient figures. He spent years negotiating with the Church of England. He was the man the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, rang up in a rage when plans emerged for a mass defection to the Roman Catholic Church of Anglican opponents to women priests.
Yet he was also the man who in 2008 urged the Anglican communion to take a stand against homosexuality. And his remarks fit into a conservative view of Britain, one which would have appealed to John Henry Newman in his conservative moods. And it is Newman who the pope has come here to beatify…
…This view will horrify many English Catholics. For the liberals in the English church, the reforming Second Vatican Council of the 60s opened the church to learning from the outside world…But to Pope Benedict and his circle, the council showed it had learned all the necessary lessons of the 500 years since the Reformation. Now it is time once more for the world to learn from the church.
This view has a certain lunatic consistency. By blaming almost everything wrong with the church on liberalism and acoustic guitars, it pushes into the future any consideration of whether things will get better when those have been extirpated. It sets up the Catholic church as defender of European identity against Islam, and against secularism. The restoration of the Latin mass is also, partly, an attempt to restore Europe to its Christian roots by establishing a living ritual that appears to go back centuries.
All this, I think, is what the Vatican really believes it is up to, and Kasper just blurted it out.
Catharine Pepinster writes:
…what is truly baffling about Kasper’s comments about the third world in Britain, the idea that this country is full of people who are not from Christian Europe, is that these are the people who are bolstering Britain’s religious communities. If there is one church in Britain whose congregations are a melting pot, it is the Roman Catholic church. Once dominated by Irish migrants, Catholic churches now have rainbow congregations – Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, Spanish, Italians, Brazilians, Costa Ricans, Ghanains, Nigerians, and people from many Middle Eastern countries, including Iraqis and Palestinian Christians who have fled the troubles in their homelands.
Plenty of them arrived recently and are the kind of people who keep London going through their employment as cleaners, taxi drivers, catering staff and shop assistants. In fact, they’re just the kind of people who work at Heathrow. Cardinal Kasper, take note.
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