I have knelt and prayed to the Lord when I have sinned or been in need of divine assistance. I have investigated many forms of organised faith in search of a teaching I could believe in, from one-to-one meetings with Evangelical Christians and various forms of Buddhism to the visionary ideas of cult leaders who went on to become serial killers.
Yet, I have never felt the touch of God or the Holy Spirit or anything approaching it. Like many non-believers, I shut myself off from the idea of its existence due to contradictory scientific arguments, and have come to conclude, through its apparent absence from my own life, that it just doesn’t exist. It is therefore with a great deal of curiosity that I investigate the existence of a holy spirit with the arrival, in London, of God’s representative on earth, Pope Benedict XVI. I feel that if it were ever going to happen, this would be an appropriate time.
This journalistic task isn’t a straw man—choosing an event in which to search for the existence of God, knowing what my conclusions will be before I start. I’m not looking for a clear-cut sign or physical appearance of the Holy Spirit. Merely a glimmer of light from heaven, if only reflected in the eyes of its believers, will suffice. A more humble holy spirit, then—more like a spirit of holiness—is all I search for among the crowds, the vigils and the protests.
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Outside the Anglican Church’s home, Lambeth Palace, hundreds of police keep watch over the crowds who line the streets in anticipation of Team Vatican’s arrival. Their manager, the Pope, is due to arrive by car and leave in his famous Popemobile, which has got many people very excited. It’s the word that’s on everybody’s lips: Popemobile. Helicopters swarm overhead and snipers look out from the turrets of the Palace tower. You would think the city is under siege from some great power, and some would say it is.
The Vatican’s first ever away fixture at Lambeth Palace is an unusual show of unity with their rivals. The Anglicans split from the Vatican to form their own allegiance to God, the Church of England, in 1534, under the management of King Henry VIII. Since then, abusing Catholics has become a near-professional sport in its own right for Anglicans, who have taken the liberty of executing Catholic monarchs and writing a clause into the British constitution preventing others from succeeding to the throne.
Bad blood remains between the two biggest clubs in Christianity because, in recent years, the Vatican is accused of tapping up Anglican players who disagree with some of the latter’s views to their side. Some view the Pope’s entire visit as one big scouting trip for new talent. Others have suggested that he’s in the UK to stem the rising tide of Atheism, or to temper the disgust over the child sex abuse scandal which, like all good sex scandals, just won’t seem to go away.
A small group of women in flat shoes have marched merrily from the nearby Lambeth North tube station to take their places behind the barricade outside Lambeth Palace, chanting, singing, and sporting banners insisting that the Pope “Ordain Women Now!” It’s a joint effort by two Christian women’s groups—an Anglican group, Women and the Church, who are here in solidarity with their sisters, the Catholic Women’s Ordination. They have beautiful voices that carry peace through the airwaves as they sing, “Walking in the Light of God,” which has the poignancy of those end of term assemblies at school where the oldest year-group were sent packing into the mouth of the cruel world with the whole school singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” for the leavers. It was as though the teachers who devised those assemblies realised something we, in our youthful ignorance, had yet to; that our lives would never be better than the moment we walked through those cathedral gates for the last time and became men; and perhaps the best consolation to our future misery would be the memory of the whole school singing its heart out for us on our last day as schoolboys. It never failed to bring tears to my eyes.
“I don’t think it will make much difference,” says the very well-spoken Philip Sheridan from Eastbourne, the women’s only male supporter in attendance. “But he can’t ignore us forever. He’ll be very aware of us, and although the Church often moves very slowly, it is open to change.” I ask Philip if he’ll be joining the big march against the Pope tomorrow, and we both laugh at my use of the phrase Loony Toons to describe the protesters. “No,” he says, “We don’t want to get involved with all that. We’re still Catholics, after all, not anarchists.”
Up the way is a group of Vatican supporters wearing the team colours of brown robes and stern opposition to change. They carry “Welcome, Pope Benedict,” signs. These are monks who have come to support the Vatican, stood with a man with milk bottle-thick spectacles, yellow bucked teeth and hair combed over a balding crown. It’s hard to say if he’s come alone and tagged along with the others, or if he travelled up with them. He also has a sign welcoming Pope Benedict. His unfashionable looks seem as though he must be in lonely isolation from social pleasure or the world which shifts around him—two virtues of a life dedicated to God.
I’ve often thought it’s the vulnerable ones who get the most out of religion. God, after all, never claimed to be running a beauty pageant or a popularity contest. He loves all of his children, especially those who have been persecuted or bullied. This is why, to my mind, a religious group which denies equality to homosexuals or women, or any other group, is contradicting the very essence of God’s teachings—that we are all equal under his watch. The gay and female Christians protesting against the Pope are like the latter-day Israelites who are being denied a home by their very own Church.
There’s a fair number of Catholics here who don’t want to see the Pope on trial for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court, for his role in the covering-up of priests’ sexual abuses against children. But neither do they think the Pope’s membership of the Hitler Youth means that he still wears a Nazi armband underneath his robes, [1] [2] or that his stance against women and homosexuals is right, or his vehement opposition to the use of condoms to prevent AIDS and unwanted pregnancies is in any way responsible. Some people disagree with the Pope on some issues, but still wish to welcome him, since they are the rare breed of saintly beings who dare to tolerate intolerance. For them, a place in heaven surely awaits. But the others, who agree with the Pope on everything: They’re the kind of fans who just can’t condone a penalty awarded against their own team, no matter how horrendous the foul.
The crowds have thickened to two or three deep and the helicopters continue to circle overhead. Police continue to take their places until they match the crowd for numbers—they must be expecting trouble from these two notorious groups of fans who have a history of not only fighting, but hung-drawn-and-quartering one another. Most of the police and crowd have been standing for over an hour and are beginning to shift from one foot to another. The away-team bus finally arrives. A small motorcade of blacked-out saloon vehicles, followed by a luxury coach, emerges from Lambeth Road. “Ooh, it’s the bishops,” says one squeaky-voiced admirer, delighted by the sight of his team. Britain’s Catholic bishops and Cardinals are being ushered in to the Palace separately from the Pope, who seems to have adopted the impudence of many foreign managers—the José Mourinhos and Fabio Capellos—who regard their own personality as the essence of their team’s being.
The women begin chanting,
Ordain women now! Ordain women now!
as the bishops roll in. A male voice growls, “Never!” after every refrain—it’s heating up on the terraces. But the gates to the Palace aren’t opening, and the bishops’ team bus has stalled right next to where the women protesters are. This is great news, since the women get a good two minutes of barracking the bishops, who have no choice but to look out of their windows and face the women while offering half-hearted waves of goodwill out of the windows of the coach. By the time the gates have opened, the women are congratulating themselves on their good fortune. “They stopped right next to us,” says one woman. “So we had a right good go at them. They must have seen us, mustn’t they?”
Twenty more minutes pass, and then another convoy enters the Palace gates—this time a series of 10 silver saloon cars and mini-buses. A policeman confirms that yes, the Pope’s in one of these blacked-out mobster cars. In less than 30 seconds, the Palace gates are closed and he’s been smuggled inside like some wooden horse, ready to begin talks with the Archbishop of Canterbury about how to bring down the new Atheist contenders.
After another 30 minutes the gates are open and the same saloon cars that went inside file out again. They’re crawling out of the gates, round the roundabout and up the bridge. The cars are flanked by the imposing, black-suited figures of the Swiss Guard, the Pope’s private security mafia. Usually they wear decorative ecclesiastical dress, but on match days they turn up—like all serious teams nowadays—in suits. This glut of hired muscle has very strict entrance criteria. The Pope insists that his bodyguards are unmarried male Catholics, aged 19-30, and at least 5ft. 7 in. tall. If Pope Benedict XVI is known as God’s Rottweiler, these guys must be God’s pit-bull terriers, because they look mean as hell.
Then here it comes, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. One bulletproof, four-tonne Mercedes-Benz M-Class, known worldwide as the Popemobile, trickles out of the gates. It contains one fragile-looking Pope Benedict XVI who’s sitting in the Popemobile’s trapezoid-shaped bulletproof dugout on an upright throne and fluffed up cushion. A mixed chorus of “Wooo!” and “Booo!” is directed at the vehicle, as is the loudest chorus yet of “Ordain women now!” His Popeness is wearing the standard white gown and toothy smile. His hair is also completely white like a Persian cat. He gives a royal wave, with his hand rotating on top of his wrist like a plate at a Chinese buffet.
The presence of their chief is enough to send people into a mild frenzy. The presence of their enemy is enough to drive others wild with anger. This is high-octane stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised if people started beating their chests and waving their shirts above their heads like Geordies in the away end. I stand and laugh out loud at the spectacle because I never thought I’d be the kind of person who would come out to see the Pope, but here I am, standing and staring like everyone else. I think I saw Pope Benedict XVI for around 15 seconds total.
I head over to see a homeless woman I promised to meet by Vauxhall station. I’m secretly regretting making an agreement to help her out of the terrible situation she’s embroiled in at the moment. On the way, I get a phone call from a friend who’s barely audible above the police barking orders and the helicopters in full battle mode. I tell my friend that I’ve just seen the Pope in the flesh. She asks: “What did you throw at him?” “Nothing,” I said, “It was really funny. I’ve had a really good time. Now I’m going to see that homeless person and get her something to eat.”
“Really?” my friend said. “Why are you feeding the homeless when the Pope, as a Christian, ought to be the one feeding the poor?”
I don’t have an answer for that question. I later discover that there are plenty of Catholic charities donating billions of pounds a year to fight humanitarian problems, but the Pope’s own policies of lobbying against contraception nullify a lot of the work being done by his fellow Catholics. His anti-condom stance leads to uncontrollable birth-rates in developing countries, leading to greater levels of poverty, as well as the spread of HIV and AIDS. The Vatican is absurdly rich, with vast amounts of gold bullion held in the U.S. Federal Reserve and Bank of England, as well as property and stocks that make it one of the world’s richest corporations. Nevertheless, the Pope has steered well clear of the poor and needy on this visit.
The homeless woman didn’t turn up, so I got there early for the Nope! Pope fundraising party at Conway Hall in Holborn, where a variety of anti-Pope comedians, cabaret acts, speakers and musicians entertain a remarkably titchy 200-strong audience at the home of the Ethical Society, named after the American civil libertarian Moncure Daniel Conway. The guests are welcomed into the hallway with an invite to throw eggs at a picture of Pope Benedict XVI, under the heading, “Eggs Benedict.” That’s witty in a way that Bernard Manning would have approved, which doesn’t mean it’s not funny—it really is—but if I was a Catholic I’d be offended by someone throwing eggs at a picture of the leader of my faith. He is, after all, supposed to be God’s spokesman on earth. It doesn’t seem a million miles away from burning crosses or Qur’ans to me. And while these things are all a valid form of expression—which we’re all legally entitled to—it’s not the kind of stunt that presents the Atheist/Humanist lobby as the intellectually superior alternative to organised religion.
In the lobby a short-haired, middle-aged American woman handing out leaflets has an apologetic way of approaching you that says she’s promoting a cause that you wouldn’t feel comfortable discussing over dinner. My instincts are proved right when the woman says that she is an outreach officer for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), after which a man politely takes a leaflet and pretends to be engrossed. This exchange adheres to the general rule that when a sex abuse victim speaks, you fucking listen. The leaflet contains infant-school photos of children looking all cutesy in their school uniforms and their hair neatly parted. We are later informed that these are photos of the SNAP founders at the age when they were sexually abused by their spiritual elders. The SNAP woman sits next to me, eager to tell me more about her organisation. I have no choice but to listen carefully.
British law makes it clear that you need written consent before revealing the identity of a sex abuse victim, and I didn’t feel like asking her to sign an affidavit, so let’s just call her June. I ask June if it’s just the Catholic Church which is to blame, or if kids get messed with by the leaders of all faiths. “We’re hearing from people who have been abused by the elders and priests of all religions,” she says. “From Jews to Christians to Mormons. But in real tight-knit communities like the Amish and some Muslim communities, not so much, because people are so afraid to speak out. They will be chastised and thrown out of their community. A Father is a very powerful man in the community. How are children going to stand up and speak out against them? We are trying to encourage those children to come out,” she says.
The lobby has become pretty busy, with a lot of gay men and women in fancy dress—most of which is a subversion of ecclesiastical dress—taking up the offer to play some Eggs Benedict and to get unofficially married at the gay altar. There’s also a “Heretical Tombola,” with a number of cheap-but-naughty prizes adorning the table, including a number of Dan Brown novels. I don’t know if they’re there as part of the anti-religious furniture, or if the person buying the prizes thinks we’re all morons. Onstage there are four comedians, including Liz Carr, a disabled lesbian in a wheelchair who comes out with corkers such as: “I’ve just come back from Amsterdam, where everything is legal. I was offered sex, drugs and euthanasia.” Boom! She’s great.
Then a piece of seriousness waddles onstage like a human caterpillar, carrying a banner decorated with the faces of the same abused children that are in the SNAP leaflet. Four people hold the banner, which is as wide as the stage. The faces above the canvas which gaze out at the audience have the optimism of a cancer that’s waiting to hear if it’s terminal. The central face breaks off from the caterpillar, which I realise belongs to June, the woman who gave me the leaflet. After a respectful round of applause, she begins speaking into the microphone to an audience which is bound by that unwritten rule about listening when certain kinds of people are speaking.
“For so long we were boys and girls who’d been abused,” says June. “We were alone and we were helpless. But then we found each other, and that was incredibly comforting and helpful. But now, we’ve found all of you, and that’s the most amazing thing in the world—to see thousands of people who support us, and who understand the difference between talk and action. We’re incredibly grateful to you. We thank you for having us here, we’re honoured to be with you,” says June, earning a huge ovation from the audience of fancy-dress gay bishops.
After the last comedian, the MC announces that the disco will begin shortly. I don’t know how much I’d need to drink before thinking that a disco heavily populated by sex abuse victims seemed like fun. This is their night, so I let them have it without my scrupulous eye bearing down on them and making unfair inferences about the horrors of their childhood based on how they dance.
On Saturday, I follow the Nope! Pope t-shirted crowds out of the Tube station to the Hard Rock cafe opposite Green Park, where thousands of protesters have gathered. The protesters coming out of the station are vastly outnumbered by the people with yellow satchels attending the Pope’s official mass in Hyde Park. Tickets are near-impossible to come by for the mass, since the press had to sign up months ago and regular entry had to be applied for through your local Catholic Church. So in case you’re wondering why I’m attending the protests rather than the mass, it’s because I couldn’t get a ticket to the mass—couldn’t even find a tout willing to fleece me for one. It seems odd that anybody would want to limit access to God’s messenger on earth. But thankfully the protest is open to everybody, so that’s where I am, waiting for Alex the photographer and the Holy Spirit to swing by.
“This is more fun than Gay Pride,” says one man. “We should do this every year.” A lot of people are treating this like Mardi Gras, having dressed up as a variety of camp characters, most popular of which are obviously the Pope and other members of the clergy. I bet there are some from last night who haven’t got changed.
At the front of the procession there’s a flat-bed truck which is hooked up to a microphone and speakers, on which stands the event organiser, Marco Tranchino. He begins to get some call-and-response going. “What do we want? A secular Europe! When do we want it? Now!” I never thought I’d hear the term “A secular Europe!” being chanted by thousands of people. The phrase’s terrible scansion doesn’t stop Marco from soliciting it like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, the response to which gets better and better as people figure out how to chant “A secular Europe!” without sounding like fools.
A few people are voicing their objections, because they don’t actually want a secular Europe. “I don’t mind religion,” says a transvestite bishop. “It’s the politicisation of religious beliefs that I can’t stand. So to say that we want a completely secular Europe is untrue. We just don’t want one group’s view to be given a privileged position in society just because it’s justified using religious dogma.”
After a leisurely march past Piccadilly Circus it all grinds to a halt outside Downing Street, where the road has been cordoned off in anticipation of the rally. The event’s organisers—hoarse after all those demands for a secular Europe and for the Pope to “leave those kids alone!”—ask the police to kindly open up the barricades to allow more people to gather around the truck to hear the speakers. Once everyone’s been crammed into the street, which they’re now saying contains 20,000 people, the Atheists’ Richard Dawkins comes to the microphone. Many people accuse Dawkins of being a “fundamentalist” Atheist, similar to the zealots who give religion a bad name. Let’s see, then.
Professor Dawkins steps forward to the microphone to the kind of ovation usually reserved for Glastonbury headliners. “I was at first as outraged as everybody else at the Pope’s opening remarks when he landed in Edinburgh, blaming Atheists for the atrocities of Hitler and the others of the 20th century. But then I took comfort from it, because it seemed to me that in a way it was showing that we had rattled them so much...” People begin to cheer at the first blow being landed..[3]
But then he says, “Adolf Hitler was a Roman Catholic. He was baptised, he never renounced his baptism. The figure of five million British Catholics is presumably obtained from baptismal figures. I don’t believe a word of it...but if they want to claim them as Catholics, then they have to claim Hitler as a Catholic.” He then continues to tie the crimes of Hitler to Catholicism and presenting evidence that Hitler was a Christian, despite saying less than a minute ago that using the same rhetoric to condemn Atheism is outrageous.
Then it’s the turn of SNAP chairperson Barbara Blaine, whose name being announced in public means I can name her without an affidavit. She speaks quite graphically about being raped by a priest as a child. “We heard the Pope make statements today,” she says, with everyone adhering to that golden rule again. “They were declared to be the most profound apologies yet. But let’s be clear: Apologies do not protect children. In order to protect children, we need the Pope to take action,” says Barbara Blaine, before outlining the measures she believes are needed to protect children:
1. An openly accessible database of all the “credibly accused” predators in the church.
2. Open up the files about crimes made by priests that are held by the Vatican in church archives. Turn over all records to the authorities.
3. Discipline the bishops who have covered up the crimes.
If a sex abuse victim suggested a punishment for the “credibly accused” priests similar to that given to Mary, Queen of Scots, this liberal crowd would have supported it. While measures (2) and (3) seem perfectly reasonable, putting the names of priests who have been “credibly accused”—whatever that means—on a public database, linking them to sex crimes before they have been found guilty in court, is the kind of witch hunt I’m sure most people cheering are actually against when those accused aren’t clergymen—like terrorist suspects held indefinitely without trial, for example.
There’s no clearer demonstration than Barbara Blaine’s speech that, while justice must be sought for the horrific crimes she and others have endured, there’s a good reason civilised societies don’t put victims in charge of the punishment of their tormentors. The reason is you end up with punitive measures against the accused which are carried out in passion and hate, rather than rationality and justice—two values which are supposed to be at the heart of the Protest the Pope campaign and the Atheist movement.
Many more convincing arguments rise against the Pope’s visit, but there are some particularly memorable lines from Geoffrey Robertson QC, who has the varnished face of a brass doorknob and a noble pomp to his speech you really don’t hear enough of these days. “Friends, Roman Pontiff, Countrymen,” he begins, to huge cheers of approval. “We are here today to celebrate our faith—our faith in liberty of conscience, our faith in liberty, our faith in human rights,” which really sends everybody crazy, like in the American conference halls where the preacher makes everyone fall back into one another’s arms, telling them it was the Holy Spirit taking over them.
It’s become clear that this rally is the equivalent of an Atheist mass, with a different kind of spirit touching people than the Holy Spirit. It’s the first instance in the UK of Atheists coming together to celebrate their religious views, as far as I’m aware of, and as far as you could call their views religious.
Usually, the voice of Atheism has emerged from various disparate sources, since people’s lack of faith has never been enough to unite them. There really is no church for non-believers, but the leaders of this rally are bringing people together with the same common purpose as organised religions do for their believers. But since they don’t believe in a higher being whose holiness to celebrate, Atheists are only ever likely to come together in opposition, which makes a lot of their actions—I’m thinking the Eggs Benedict jibes and the facetious references to Hitler—seem reactionary and offensive, when they claim to speak for enlightenment and compassion.
I’ll have to conclude that it’s mission failed.
[1] . Richard J Evens, The Third Reich in Power, 2005, p. 272
Following Joseph Ratzinger’s 14th birthday in 1941, he was conscripted into The Hitler Youth, membership was required by law for all 14 year old boys after December 1939.
3 Valker Dahm, Director of Nazi-era research for Munich’s institute for Contemporary History.
“Refusing to sign up could mean being sent to a youth “re-education camp” akin to a concentration camp.”
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