Oh dear, I tried to read this (just the first four paragraphs!) to Peter and couldn’t do it with a straight face:
Telegraph - Revealed: Tony Blair’s Catholic secret, By Damian Thompson
The scene: the nave of Westminster Cathedral, its Byzantine mosaics glistening below bare brick walls that are still unfinished after a century. The occasion: Solemn Vespers for His late Holiness Pope John Paul II.
Enter Tony Blair, the (Protestant) Prime Minister of the (Protestant) United Kingdom, who makes a little bob of genuflection before the Catholic Blessed Sacrament.
Enter the Prime Minister’s wife, a feminist Catholic who did not even wear a hat to the funeral of the Princess of Wales.
She is not wearing a hat this time, either: dangling from her head is a black lace veil known as a mantilla. She looks like a Sicilian widow about to fling herself on her husband’s coffin.
Pfff-hahahah!
Ahem. I could have sworn, though, that Blair was Catholic. On a stack of bibles. Onwards:
In the pews, the editor of one Catholic newspaper turns to the chairman of another.
Editor: “Is Cherie wearing what I think she’s wearing?” Chairman: “Good God. I haven’t seen a mantilla for 20 years.”
Hahahahah!
“Last time I looked, Britain wasn’t a Roman Catholic country,” wrote Vicki Woods in The Telegraph the next morning. And, of course, it isn’t. But last Monday, it wasn’t doing a very good impression of a Protestant one.
“It was like a miracle,” says Fr Michael Seed, ecumenical adviser to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. “Tony Blair, Prince Charles, Lady Thatcher, John Major, Michael Howard, Charles Kennedy, the Lord Chancellor, half the Cabinet and the entire diplomatic corps, plus the Union flag at half mast and prayers in mosques… This is a time of God’s blessing on the earth.”
Oh lord, this is the funniest article…
Most people have assumed that he did not, since - after years of receiving the sacrament when he accompanied his family to Mass in London - Mr Blair had been told by the late Cardinal Basil Hume that this was not appropriate for a non-Catholic. He duly stopped.
Oh deary me.
Oh good heavens, I cannot stop:
According to reliable reports, it was the Queen who ordered Charles to spend Friday morning listening to Latin plainchant in Bernini’s magnificent piazza rather than marrying his long-term mistress in the Guildhall at Windsor.
Why? The Queen (unlike her late sister) has no leanings towards Catholic mysticism: she shares the robust, no-frills churchmanship of her father and grandfather. (It is a brave clergyman who wears a Roman chasuble in the presence of his Monarch.) She respected Pope John Paul, but her tribute to him was the least effusive of any head of state.
On the other hand, she is no more keen than the late pontiff on register office weddings - and, as we know, will be boycotting this one. So she is unlikely to have turned a hair at instructing her son to postpone the event.
But the attendance of the Prince of Wales at the funeral of a pope - especially this pope - has ramifications that oblige the Sovereign to follow the advice of her Prime Minister and at least listen to that of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
And it is that advice, rather than the Queen’s personal wishes, that brought about Charles and Camilla’s embarrassing change of plan - that, and the fact that, as one Royal confidant puts its, “half their bloody guests are going to be in Rome”.
Hah!
Peter thinks I’m insane but I can’t stop laughing!
“The strange death of Protestant England” read a headline in the Guardian the next day. “Catholicism hasn’t been this chic since Bloody Mary burned Rowan Williams’s first Protestant predecessor at the stake.”
ninme shrieks with laughter
Peter looks worried
And it is true that foreign tourists in England could have been forgiven for thinking that our tabloid newspapers were edited from, say, Galway.
!!!
And, to end on a serious note, for those of you voting in a few weeks’ time:
Cherie’s Catholicism embraces the cause of women’s ordination, something that John Paul II specifically forbade any Catholic to support. Tony has attended Masses for years without ever picking up the Catholic message that late-term abortion is infanticide. He is going into this general election as the only party leader who does not support a lowering of the abortion limit to 20 weeks.
If John Paul II had foreseen that, we can be sure of one thing: he would not have allowed the British Prime Minister to receive Holy Communion.
Update: This is really funny, too, as we’re on the subject:
Telegraph - I can’t picture Camilla in a mantilla, By Sarah Sands
Prince Charles is prone to self-pity, but he shouldn’t take the death of the Pope any more personally than the weather. The subsequent death of Prince Rainier might have started to look like guest-list malevolence, just as Prince Charles must have wondered whether his artistic friends owed any mourning allegiance to Saul Bellow.
But death happens. I remember a picture editor scrolling through the news wires in the frantic days following the death of Diana. He clapped his big hand on his forehead and cried out indignantly: “Oh, now look, Mother Teresa has gone and died.”
April 25th, 2005 at 12:45 pm
Oh, Ninme… you’re just too good to me. Anyway, for those among your readership who might not know what “scram” means, it’s just nuke jargon for the way we quickly shut down the reactor (so the zoomies don’t hurt us anymore…)