Is the Pope Catholic?

It’s not a trick question.

After thirteen years of Catholic schooling you’d think I might know the answer. But I saw Sinead O’Connor on the telly this week saying the pope did not own the church. She said she thought it belonged to the people, it’s “our church”, she said, and basically indicated he could get lost for all she cared.

And then, the next morning, I heard on the radio that since the Catholic Church couldn’t convince its members to pay to pray, they were rounding up busloads full of school kids in an effort to fill the stadiums in which Pope Benedict XVI will be appearing over the next few days.

Which led me to start thinking about whom this visit was for. The State is paying, right, so it must be a visit for the British people?

But if even the Catholics aren’t particularly interested, who is?

The gay and lesbian community don’t want the pope to visit. Supporters of women’s rights don’t want the pope to visit. Scientists don’t want the pope to visit. Those protesting the massive cuts in public service spending and objecting to the £10-12 million cost to the taxpayer don’t want the pope to visit. (That £10-12 million figure, incidentally, does not cover policing costs, which will come out of existing, massively slashed, police budgets). I, as an ordinary woman, brought up Catholic but now non-practicing, do not want the pope to visit.

So who wants the pope to visit?

Gordon Brown, so it seems. Yes, he invited the most unpopular pope in living memory to Britain at the cost of the taxpayer. A spokesman told the BBC at the time:

“The PM is obviously delighted at the prospect of a visit from Pope Benedict XVI to Britain.

“It would be a moving and momentous occasion for the whole country and he would undoubtedly receive the warmest of welcomes.”

Hmmm. No doubt we’ll be questioning Gordy’s judgement for some time to come on this and other things. To be fair, though, David Cameron also weighed in on the delighted stakes, saying, firstly (of course), that he was delighted, and then:

“Such a visit – the first in over a quarter of a century – would be greatly welcomed not only by Roman Catholics but by the country as a whole.”

Um, are these people really claiming to have their collective fingers on the pulse of the British electorate?

That deals with the current PM and his predecessor, so what about the one before that, the Catholic convert, Tony Blair.

It’s not for nothing he waited till he was out of office to convert to Catholicism. And, I mean, do you blame him for converting? Which Church would you pray in after you’d orchestrated the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and the destruction of two nations in the face of overwhelming opposition by your own constituents? Probably the same Church that hides, covers up and forgives paedophiles. If they can forgive child molesters, they can forgive Tony, right?

You’ve got to hand it to him – he was always very savvy. I could have swallowed an invitation sent by him; it would have been like an official, public absolving of his sins. But, as I say, Tony was too savvy to believe in his wildest dreams that the British public would support a State-sponsored visit by a pope embroiled in one of the biggest controversies the Catholic Church has faced in the past century.

Gordy probably deserves some credit. There is kind of a reason for the pope’s invitation to visit. Apparently some dead bloke called Cardinal Newman is about to be ‘beatified’, which means he’s one step closer to becoming a saint. And what miracle did Cardinal Newman perform, exactly, to deserve this honour? Well it seems he didn’t actually ‘perform’ anything much, not while he was alive anyway. An American deacon, Jack Sullivan, claims he was cured of all pain after praying to Cardinal Newman in 2001 – 111 years after the Cardinal’s death.

Really?

I will let Richard Dawkins speak for me on that subject.

Back to Gordon. Always hoping to give the guy some credit, I will acknowledge the fact that the pastoral costs of the visit have to be met by the Catholic Church in Britain. Not the Vatican, mind you – one of the world’s richest institutions – but the Catholic Church in Britain. This sum is expected to amount to roughly £7 million. As of this week, the Church had raised £5.1 million, £4 million of which came from rich Catholics (it is unclear if the Blairs donated).

And how are they raising the rest? By charging people to go to the mass and asking for donations in the collection plate at Sunday mass.

The Catholic Church has a massively expanding population here, mainly thanks to immigrants from Poland, Latin America and Africa. It is estimated that there are just over 5 million Catholics in England and Wales, making up 9.6 per cent of the population. In Scotland, the estimate is 700,000, representing 14 per cent of the population. This, however, is only an estimate since many immigrant Catholics are here illegally.

A report by the Cambridge-based Von Hugel Institute in 2007 entitled “The Ground of Justice” found that Catholic Churches in London were being overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing numbers attending mass. Some parishes began running services all day Sunday to meet demand and many were acting as de facto job centres. The report urged the leadership of the Catholic Church to act immediately to help the migrants and recommended investment in new resources to do so.

So it’s a good time for the pope to come to Britain – a little meet and greet, if you will, of the new members of the only Christian Church to be growing in numbers in Britain.

And how does it respond?

By getting poorly paid immigrant workers to chip in in the Sunday collection. And with £7 million to raise, it’s no small feat. I can just see the Polish workers in the pews figuring out how to donate a little more out of the wage they receive from working as a carer at an old people’s home. If the extra £2 million is to be raised this week, those Polish builders might have to start charging an average British wage and then where will the renovation plans of the British nation be? Up the creek, that’s where, along with the pope and several Belgian bishops.

It’s not that I mind, particularly, about the pope coming to Britain. Free speech and all that. (Plus, I remember when I was in primary school in Australia and the pope visited there, we all got a day off. It was summer and I played slip and slide on my best friend’s front lawn. I wouldn’t want to deprive any British Catholic school kids that kind of privilege.) It’s just that I object to the way it’s being paid for. Even more than the cost to the State, I object to the Catholic Church charging people to go to mass. They insist they are not charging people to go to mass, they are merely asking people to contribute to the travel and accommodation costs of the pope. Tickets were originally £25 a pop for the beatification ceremony, although I now believe the rent-a-crowd are hopping on buses for free. Accommodation costs include 30 Vatican officials staying at the Goring Hotel in Belgravia where the cheapest room is £375 a night.

What happened to the vow of poverty? Did it somewhere along the line turn into a “vow to keep the parishioners in poverty by making them pay for our excessive travel and accommodation costs, all while we sit on one of the world’s largest – and most secretly guarded – fortunes?”

Nobody knows for sure how much the Catholic Church is worth, such is the notorious secrecy of the Vatican, but it is undoubtedly the world’s richest institution. The Italian-born Vatican critic Avro Manhattan wrote a book, The Vatican Billions, in 1983 that quoted the United Nations World Magazine estimate that the Vatican owned several billion dollars worth of solid gold, some of it kept here in Britain. His conservative estimate of the Vatican’s share portfolio came in at more than $500 million (bear in mind this was more than 20 years ago), and the gold and shares were just the tip of the iceberg. But even this man, who spent much of his life studying the Roman Catholic Church, had to admit defeat.

“The Catholic church is the biggest financial power, wealth accumulator and property owner in existence. She is a greater possessor of material riches than any other single institution, corporation, bank, giant trust, government or state of the whole globe. The pope, as the visible ruler of this immense amassment of wealth, is consequently the richest individual of the twentieth century. No one can realistically assess how much he is worth in terms of billions of dollars," Manhattan wrote.

And yet here comes the pope and his entourage on the will of the British taxpayer and the collection plates of immigrant workers.

Selling tickets to mass.

Maybe the Church is hoarding its billions in preparation to pay the many thousands of victims who suffered child abuse at the hands of Catholic priests? It’s a thought, but I doubt it.

So, is the pope Catholic? Maybe the pope represents Catholics and maybe he doesn’t. None of the Catholics I know seem to believe in him or the Church’s stance on some of the most pressing issues of our time, including stem cell research and contraception to name but two. The views and teachings of the pope and the Catholic Church are anathema to some of the most basic tenets of British society (indeed any free society) and I therefore object to my taxes being spent on his extravagant visit. The pope, and the whole Catholic Church, are irrelevant to me and to most British people.

So, as a Catholic, will I be marking the pope’s visit? I certainly will be – in the protest march. I think Tim Minchin said it best when he said:

"Fuck the motherfucker."