The accusations against the Catholic Church are usually summed up in a single word: intolerant. Which is astounding when you consider that that's exactly what those who oppose the Pope's visit at all are being. Tolerance means putting up with, accepting and even welcoming and showing hospitality to those with whom we disagree. To say someone is not welcome because they are intolerant is hypocrisy in its most blatant form.
But the majority of those I've heard are not saying the Pope is unwelcome here, just that he should not be treated as a head of state. Putting aside his beliefs and views for a moment, this comes down to a simple question of fact: is he a head of state or isn't he? Well, I think you'll find that the Vatican City State is, shock horror, a city state. It is a sovereign entity in its own right. I think you'll also find that the Pope is the head of that sovereign state. So, whatever you think of him, whatever his beliefs and however they match up to your own, the Pope is a head of state.
Let's get something else right; despite the Catholic Church's horrific record when it comes to child protection, the Pope is not child abuser and nor does he condone such things. He has apologised for those horrible things that happened in the Irish Catholic Church and, while acknowledging that words alone are seldom enough to heal these things, he's doing what he can to put things right. As for his views on sexual conduct - well, he wouldn't be the first Catholic head of state to visit Britain and he won't be the last. I don't see the same outcry when Muslim heads of state visit Britain, despite their views and record of how women should be treated among other things. So campaigning against the Pope being treated as a head of state is at least one of three things: (a) ignorant of the straightforward fact that he is a head of state; (b) hypocritical, from those who whinge about intolerance; (c) discriminatory, singling him out while not complaining at all about state visits from others with similar beliefs and principles.
A final note is to state the obvious; the Pope has a global following and during his visit to the UK the international spotlight will be on our country. The Pope's views are well known but there are many who don't really know much about modern Britain. If, while we're in that spotlight, all we manage to do is demonstrate an inability to welcome and tolerate those with different views to our own, if we sell Britain as a stuck-up country that refuses to engage in open discussion with those we disagree with, then we are doing our country a great disservice.
Response to Stephen Fry's blog
Stephen Fry, one of the signatures in a letter opposing the Pope's visit being treated as a state visit, has been heavily criticised for doing so. The Daily Mail, the "news" paper we all love to hate, has called the letter a campaign of hate, which it clearly isn't. But the ridiculousness of their front page today has prompted our beloved national treasure (sorry, Stephen, if you're reading this - which I sincerely doubt) to blog on the subject.In his blog Stephen outlines the reason for his objection. His argument goes like this:
My only objection is that this be a State Visit. It hasn’t happened before and the Vatican is in no real sense a nation state. Visit the place: it takes fifty minutes to walk round. You don’t need a passport or visa to enter. It is a curlicue of history that makes this “absolute monarchy” (to quote the Holy See’s own website) a “country”. Under no reasonable or worthwhile definition does the Vatican match up to the old-established and widely accepted Montevideo protocols on statehood.So, the Vatican can't be a state because it takes fifty minutes to walk round; it's too small to be a state. Well I'm sorry, but size is not a factor in statehood, under the Montevideo Convention or any other definition that I've seen. You don't need a passport or visa to enter from neighbouring Italy - big deal. You can travel across most of the European Union without a passport these days, and certainly can visit a few sovereign entities a bit closer to home without one: Guernsey, Jersey, the Isle of Man. The same applied to Ireland prior to 1997. Are they suddenly not sovereign because they've relaxed their border controls? Of course not, and again the Montevideo Convention says nothing about border control or the need for passports and visas.
So what does the Montevideo Convention say?
The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.The Vatican has all of those. That is the bedrock of the "the old-established and widely accepted Montevideo protocols" that Stephen Fry blogs about, and clearly the Vatican matches up. So unless he's now going to assert that the very protocol he pointed to as being the one we should uphold is now in his "no reasonable or worthwhile definition" category, it would appear the great man has snookered himself.
