The papal visit is in jeopardy

Damian Thompson reveals the turmoil behind the scenes in the preparations for Pope Benedict XVI’s keenly awaited visit to Britain — and how the trip has been hijacked by a Blairite cadre

Last week, the Catholic Arch-bishops of England and Wales were summoned to a private meeting in London where they were given astonishing news about Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain. The pontiff is due in four months’ time (16-19 September), yet preparations were going badly wrong. Some of the major venues, while announced, had still not been booked. And worse, the Church’s share of the cost of the four-day trip had veered wildly out of control, from £7 million to a figure nearer £14 million. They later concluded that the centrepiece — an open-air Mass at Coventry airport — was probably going to have to be cancelled. It was a disaster.

There were ‘gasps from the archbishops’, I’m told. This was the Mass at which the Pope would beatify John Henry Newman. The organiser of the visit, Monsignor Andrew Summersgill, outlined their backup plan: hold the Mass in St Mary’s College, Oscott, a sprawling, clumsily modernised neo-Gothic seminary near Sutton Coldfield that Benedict is scheduled to visit anyway. ‘We can blame the change of plan on the era of austerity’ was the proposed excuse.

Crucially, only 10,000 worshippers could be accommodated at Oscott. Coventry airport can take 200,000 — a figure which is actually much smaller than the number of people who want to attend the beatification of Newman. The archbishops at the meeting immediately grasped the implications of this. They had already collected money for the Coventry Mass — how would they explain that it had been cancelled?

Relations between the members of the team organising the papal visit were tense enough before this disaster. Mgr Summersgill is something of a divisive figure — regarded by his critics as an ambitious, mitre-hungry protégé of the previous Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.