Pope’s Visit Brings Unusual Gifts

After a period of welcome obscurity, Tony Blair is suddenly everywhere again, making peace in the Middle East, promoting his memoir, and now even getting himself involved in the pope’s state visit to Britain. This is the fault of the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which chose to publish on its front page an article by Blair about Cardinal John Henry Newman, whom the pope is to beatify in Birmingham on Sunday. There is no reason to think that Blair, a recent convert to Catholicism, is particularly knowledgeable about this most famous of all British converts, but his article is interesting all the same for what it says about its author.

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.

I can’t imagine why this matters, but the answers revealed by Professor Robin Dunbar this week are that most people have around 150 friends of which only five belong to their inner circle – friends they see at least once a week and who will offer emotional support when needed. On that basis, I have no close friends at all, for living in the country I see nobody except the gardener “at least once a week”. But even those who do manage to do so are doomed to lose a couple of them if they have the misfortune to fall in love.

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.”

After being informed of the arrests, the Pope confirmed he would continue with his arrangements which will be unaffected by the developments. Hundreds of police officers are involved in the multi million pound operations to protect the pope on his visit along with Vatican security and members of the Swiss Guard.

The sale of unique gifts and novelty gifts is said to be worth tens of millions of pounds during the Pope’s first ever state visit to the UK.