Cardinal 'reveals Vatican's true beliefs'
Guardian editorial
| 17 Sep 2010
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rdinal Kasper: 'When you arrive at Heathrow you think at times that you've landed in a Third World country.'
Cardinal Walter Kasper's sudden diplomatic illness tells us almost as much about the Vatican's real plans as his undiplomatic remarks to a German news magazine. In an interview with Focus , he said "an aggressive new atheism has spread through Britain. If, for example, you wear a cross on British Airways, you are discriminated against."
Kasper is normally one of the Vatican's more diplomatic and emollient figures. He spent years negotiating with the Church of England. He was the man the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, rang up in a rage when plans emerged for a mass defection to the Roman Catholic Church of Anglican opponents to women priests.
Yet he was also the man who in 2008 urged the Anglican Communion to take a stand against homosexuality. And his remarks fit into a conservative view of Britain, one which would have appealed to John Henry Newman in his conservative moods. And it is Newman who the pope has come here to beatify.
Britain today, said Kasper, is "a secularised [translation corrected] and pluralist country. Sometimes, when you land at Heathrow, you think you have entered a third world country."
The standard liberal remedies for the church's decline hold no attraction for the cardinal. "Look at the Protestant churches," he said: "They have married priests and women priests, too. Are they doing better? The Church of England has also taken on terrible problems with these developments. I wouldn't wish those problems on my church."
This is not only stupefyingly tactless, and wrong (the Church of England has 600 priests in training, half of them women; the Roman Catholic church here has 39), it is also bizarre, in view of the pope's initiative last year to welcome married Anglican clergy, if they are opposed to women priests.
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