The Pope’s visit shows that modern Britain remains gripped by its old anti-Catholic hatreds

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Pope Benedict XVI waves to the crowd at the end of a papal Mass

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However, The Irish Times is being far too generous with history: In Northern Ireland, a part of the UK, such prejudice and institutionalised state-sponsored discrimination continued unabated until at least the 1970s. In less formal ways, it continues to this very day throughout many parts of the UK.
 
A cursory glance at the British press, which would normally pride itself on its tolerance in matters ethnic, religious and racial, shows extreme intolerance of a Church which dares to contradict its secular creed. However, for all the political correctness about race, it is not at all difficult to tolerate a person with a different skin tone. The real test of tolerance comes when you meet people with different ideas. In this, the British media has utterly failed the test of its tolerance of other’s views; and this failure is most pronounced on the left.
 
The Catholic Church’s hierarchy has given plenty of good reasons to criticise it, but in Britain, many of its critics’ motivations now go far beyond a fair-minded exploration of its faults, and far beyond the anger most Catholics share at the abuse cover up. They also fail distinguish between the hierarchy and the 1 billion plus people who really comprise the Church.
 
The real issue at stake goes to the great existential and philosophical split of our times: between those who believe in the spiritual and those who don’t; and those who believe in an objective morality and those who think right and wrong are relative, negotiable and arbitrary. Let’s call this latter view the “secular orthodoxy,” (the eminently sensible Henry Porter of the Observer, an atheist, refers to it critically using this term.)
 
This morally relativistic secular orthodoxy is by far the dominant ideology in Britain and in much of its media. The pope’s stated aim is to take on this moral relativism and its exponents appear to have decided that ad hominem attacks on “God’s Rottweiler” are the best way forward.
 
There are real moral debates to be had, especially around issues of homosexuality and married priests, but at some level of their being, the people who lead the cheers for the secular orthodoxy fear that their dream of a secular utopia is doomed – perhaps because in Britain it is clear that it has already failed.
 
Much criticism of the Church is fair-minded and based in fact. However, some have other, more sinister agendas. Such adherents of the secular orthodoxy often frame much of their criticism of the Church along these lines: “I just love children, justice and human rights so much that I feel I simply must speak out against this nasty Church”.
However, a deeper look at those who shout loudest often shows a dark hypocrisy: Peter Tatchell’s recent hour-long attack on the Pope and the Church on British television was, he claimed, founded upon his concern for children. Yet he campaigns for it to be made legal for 14-year-olds to have sex with adults. Worse, in 1997, Mr. Tatchell wrote a letter to the Guardian defending an academic book about “Boy-Love” saying that the book’s arguments were “courageous.” He said “several of my friends - gay and straight, male and female - had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13.”

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