Letters | 12 June 2010

Christian values

Sir: I have no inside track on the organisational perils of the Pope’s visit described by Damian Thompson (‘Spinning the Pope’, 5 June) though, as a career civil servant, I am more inclined to the cock-up than to the conspiracy theory of government and see no reason why Church affairs should be any different.

The issue about whether the Pope should address himself while in Britain to global issues rather than to specifically Roman Catholic preoccupations is more germane. There are still millions of Catholic faithful in the UK. But there are even more millions of non-Catholics and non-Christians for whom the Pope’s relevance, other than as a VIP, is a case waiting to be made. The temptation for a Church with a huge credibility problem is to preach to the converted. But that risks turning off all those who, as in politics, occupy a sceptical, but not invariably hostile, middle ground.