Unusual Gifts From The Pope's Visit

Pope-fever has hit the UK and all over the country

, Christians are looking to take something from the occasion, be it inspiration or the blessing of a young child. The first state visit Pope Benedict XVI has ever made is causing quite a stir.

The event is surrounded by security, terror threats and controversy but what has been overlooked is the amount of people jumping on the bandwagon and capitalising on the visit with souvenirs and commemorative gifts. But as you would expect, there is a lot of junk on offer which has been designed to make a cheap buck out of all the pontiff's supporters. Street vendors are offering baseball caps for up to 20. And many are flogging pilgrims t-shirts with the option to customise with the name of their church.

He thus seems to identify himself with Newman's determination to "do what he thought right, however uncomfortable or unpopular it would be" (thinking, perhaps, of himself and the Iraq war), and goes on to attribute the same kind of intellectual courage to Pope Benedict XVI. But then he points out that such uncompromising positions are difficult to hold "in the contemporary world where opinion is overwhelmingly shaped by the mass media" and suggests ways in which conservative teaching might be softened up a bit.

Blair may be on the defensive here because he has often been criticised by orthodox Catholics for supporting legal abortion and same-sex unions. So he cites Newman again as saying that there can never be an end to the development of church doctrine and that all doctrine must enjoy the consensus of the whole "body of the faithful" to be considered infallible. "I doubt if this voice is yet taken seriously enough on moral questions, or if we have yet fully digested the implications of these ideas," Blair writes. "The tendency of some religious leaders to bundle a large number of different ideas into a bag marked 'secularism', then treat it as a sinister package, is divisive in pluralist societies."

Not content with implying that Newman would not be opposed to a bit of compromise on sexual issues, Blair even suggests that the putative saint would be a supporter of his Faith Foundation and its support for development projects because it was Newman who had first "put the concept of development on the map" and without whom "we probably would not be using the terms 'Millennium Development Goals' or 'international development' today".

by: Tom Doerr

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