Condoms, gay nuptials touted for Benedict’s trip to Britain

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Civil servants’ ‘far-fetched ideas’ for pontiff’s itinerary prompts apologies from Foreign Office

The Province
  
25 April 2010
  
By Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Sunday Telegraph
   
With Britain preparing to host its first papal visit in 28 years, Whitehall officials were all too aware of the significance of the event.

The trip by Pope Benedict XVI could not have come at a more sensitive time for a Catholic Church embroiled in a wide-reaching scandal over child abuse committed by its clerics.

A committee of British civil servants, called the Government’s Papal Visit Team, was established to ensure that the trip goes smoothly.

Yet the decision has backfired spectacularly, with the emergence of a leaked official document circulated around Whitehall that mocked the Pope and ridiculed the teachings of the Catholic Church. The Foreign Office was forced to apologize, and a senior civil servant was transferred to other duties.

Among the proposals raised by members of the Papal Visit Team during a “brainstorming” session and included in the document were plans for the Pope to open an abortion ward and bless a gay marriage.

They also thought he might, while visiting in September, launch a range of “Benedict” condoms and drop the church’s opposition to homosexual couples being able to adopt.

Many of the ideas on the list ridicule the church’s teachings, and appear to be provocative rather than a serious attempt to plan the Pope’s itinerary.

Senior civil servants who saw the memo swiftly conducted an investigation into how such ideas came to be aired and recorded in a memo and circulated at senior levels.

The Papal Visit Team’s document was circulated within Whitehall by a junior Foreign Office official, an Oxbridge graduate in his 20s. Attached to a March 5 memo were “background documents,” including the “ideal visit” list, which would form the basis of discussions. He added in the memo: “Please protect; these should not be shared externally. The ‘ideal visit’ paper in particular was the product of a brainstorm which took into account even the most far-fetched of ideas.”

The exercise appears to have been intended to ensure a high-impact papal visit that identified areas such as development and climate change on which the government and the Vatican could co-operate, but the list of ideas has caused offence.

The Rt. Rev. Malcolm McMahon, Roman Catholic Bishop of Nottingham, expressed dismay that such proposals would be included in a government document. “This is appalling. You don’t invite someone to your country and then disrespect them in this way,” he said.

The disclosure of the secret proposals is bound to deepen concerns and cause dismay among the country’s four million Catholics.

Further suggestions on the “ideal visit” list are that the Pope should reverse the Church’s “policy on women bishops/ ordain woman” and that the Vatican should “sponsor a network of AIDS clinics.”

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