The Pope's visit to England

His Holiness Pope Benedict is due to visit the UK later this year. As with the previous Pope he appears to be staying away from Northern Ireland. There is a lot of argument over who should be paying for this visit as some taxpayers money is to be used for issues such as security.

Given that the current incumbent of the Holy See has not exactly gone out of his way to make nice with people of other religions and none these costs might be justified. The Pope's actions should also be seen in the light that he was the head of the rebranded inquisition, the Office of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.

The Bishops of England and Wales have asked the laity to stump up money to pay for the pastoral costs involved. Based on the evidence of the collection at our church this morning the laity aren't too keen on this idea. We live in tough times as we did when the previous pontiff visited these shores in 1982. However, the British arm of the Catholic church is particularly good at not paying a blind bit of notice to what its leaders want just because they ask for something. I was expecting the collection to be low due to the fact that church was barely half full this morning but I wouldn't have been surprised to see a couple of buttons in the plate when I saw how low the congregation is.

Our bishop isn't desperately popular in many parts of the Diocese for a whole variety of reasons. He has only just asked for more money from the laity to get his books straight. If he hadn't invested in the stock market so heavily he might have had more money. In our country asking for money from the congregation never goes down well. Also the laity have a lot of issues with the church hierarchy and the way it runs the church. Also the fact that the Catholic church is worth billions of pounds tends to say to people if you want to put on events you can damn well pay for them.

The Church doesn't appear to learn lessons and seems unwilling to countenance change and so the more socially militant end of the spectrum which encompasses a large proportion of western catholicism (the bit with all the money) refuses to pay. The Reverend Ian Paisley is rumoured to have once sent the collection plate back round one church saying that 'The Lord is not satisfied with your offering'. Unfortunately the clergy here are not as popular as he was with his congregation.