The problem isn’t the Pope, it’s the Vatican of political correctness
By Peter Hitchens, Mailonline
Actually, I am uneasy about the Pope telling us what to do.
This is part of being British, or was when I was growing up.
I can still recite great chunks of Tennyson’s wonderful Ballad Of The Fleet, all about Sir Richard Grenville and the little ship Revenge, with her valiant Protestant crew, fighting her unequal battle against the great sea-castles of King Philip, ‘the Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain’.
I had relatives who viewed the Vatican as Babylon. I was taught at school about Bloody Mary, 400 years later still a loathed figure.
Even now, I like to roll over my tongue the defiant 37th of the English Church’s 39 articles: ‘The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.’
The Pope’s warning about growing intolerance of Christianity in the British State should have been issued by the Church of England, and once could have been.
But its present leaders are for the most part pretty dim, and almost all liberals – whereas Benedict is a serious thinker, a major intellect and a conservative.
Those who are outraged – or claim to be – about the Pontiff’s warning from Rome are trying to use a force they don’t really sympathise with.
My anti-Catholic forebears were Cromwellian Puritans, and would have loathed the sexual revolution even more than they disliked the RC Church. And if these protesters are worried about foreign intervention in British affairs, they are looking in the wrong direction.
Harriet Harman’s ‘Equality’ Bill, a monstrous piece of far-Left fanaticism, flows mainly from the ideas of continental Marxists who knew little of Britain and cared less.
And – here’s the really important bit – its planned attempt to force the Churches to hire openly homosexual employees against their will have originated in that Vatican of political correctness, the European Union.
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