Pope in UK Expected to Show Beauty of Catholicism

(August 19, 2010) A Vatican spokesman says Pope Benedict XVI's trip to the United Kingdom next month will be an opportunity to effectively present a secularized society with the positive contribution and beauty of the Christian faith and the Catholic Church. Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office and Vatican Radio offered this prediction in an interview with Vatican Radio about the September 16-19 trip. The spokesman said that the Pope's first-day meeting with the queen is "awaited with great intensity and emotion," as is the Scotland leg of the trip. "I would like to remind, moreover, that the day the Pope will be in Scotland is the feast of St. Ninian, who is the patron, the evangelizer of Scotland," Father Lombardi noted. "Hence it is a very important day for the Scots." Then there will be "the Pope's great address in Westminster Hall, the meeting with society, with the world of culture, with all the most active and authoritative components of English society," he continued. "This will certainly be a moment watched with great attention." Father Lombardi added that the ecumenical dimension of the trip should not be discounted. That element includes a meeting between the Pope and the leader of the Anglican Communion, the archbishop of Canterbury. Father Lombardi classified the closing vigil in Hyde Park and the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman as the "spiritual heart of this visit." He mentioned the bond that unites the Holy Father to Cardinal Newman, a poet and Anglican pastor, subsequently received in the Catholic Church and made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. The Jesuit priest added that he hoped that this trip will also be a manifestation of the beauty, of the positiveness of the Holy Father's service in society, much more so in times in which we also have had moments of controversy.