The Pope to sponsor an AIDS clinic? The Church already runs more than anyone else, and promotes the only provenly effective strategy against HIV infection.
A helpline for abused children? Yes, indeed. For the victims of social services departments and their academic associates, for the victims of the Sex Education industry, for the victims of Police failure to enforce the age of consent from 13 upwards, and for the victims of the views of those shouting most loudly against (or ostensibly against - see below) the Papal Visit.
What really seems to have horrified the BBC, and clearly also the Whitehall playpen, was the suggestion that the Holy Father might visit a council flat. And that, moreover, in Bradford, which the Beeb helpfully explained was "in the North of England" (oh, the horror!), unlike the every Home Counties hamlet with which viewers and listeners are invariably assumed to be intimately familiar.
At this rate, the Visit will be cancelled. And who wants that? Certainly not Peter Tatchell, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Geoffrey Robertson, Libby Purves, Johann Hari, Stephen Fry, the BBC, The Times, the National Secular Society, or, we now see, the relevant civil servants and government advisers. They want the Holy Father to come here and be murdered. They are deliberately, and in concert with each other, creating a mood in which such a murder would at least be attempted.
It seems more like something which would appear on Mock The Week and surely the FO official used government equipment/time to compose this. And junior official gives the impression of "photo copy operator". You can bet he was a graduate at Cambridge/Oxford.
ReplyDeleteIf a more junior official had used the photo-copier to print up 10 copies of a "recipe" or "diet" there would be Hell to pay.
And I imagine if this nonsense had been directed at the Chief Rabbi or visiting Mullah, it would not be so tolerated.
It wouldn't be tolerated at all, in fact.
ReplyDeleteAnd visiting mullahs are an interesting point. All monarchs are by definition religious figures, since there can be no purely atheistic or secular reason to have a monarchy. So visiting Arab monarchs such as the King of Saudi Arabia are by definition religious figures, and there was none of this (or as good as none) over what goes in the name of Islam in their respective countries.
Yet no Muslim who is a British Citizen is in any way subject to the spiritual authority of the King of Saudi Arabia. Whereas millions of British Citizens are subject to the spiritual authority of the Pope.