By Paul Goodman
I identified last week seven barriers to a successful Papal visit - modern secularism; the impact of 9/11; the child abuse scandal; media bafflement; the deterioration of the relations with the Church of England; and money - and wrote that I hoped that the barriers could be cleared.
It's evident that they were, and here are seven reason why the visit was a success.
- Low expectations. If an occasion's written off in advance as a failure, it's more likely to out-perform the expected outcome than if it's expected to be a triumph.
- The Pope's message. Whether one agrees with the Pope or not, he has a case to make, which is strongly rooted and carefully compiled. He seized the unique chance of blanket British media coverage to get his message across. Yesterday evening, others - not least the Prime Minister - were responding to his agenda.
- The Catholic Church's media exposure. Intelligent and articulate lay Catholics - Eamon Duffy, Clifford Longley, Peter Stanford - don't usually get a lot of airtime, let alone at once. The Pope's visit gave them and some of the Bishops a chance to put their view. Like the Pope, they utilised the opportunity to do so. Sky's coverage in particular was very good.
- The bomb plot that never was. The apparent Al Qaeda Papal assassination bid turned out to be Algerian street cleaner banter. Many of those who read huge headlines suggesting the former won't have read later reports describing the latter. Most people won't have liked the idea of the Pope being killed in Britain, and reports of a murder plot will therefore have done him no harm at all.
- The child abuse apology. If an institution's at fault, people want an apology. The Pope delivered it according to his own timetable, which ran more or less to plan throughout. He wasn't pelted with eggs or subject to a citizen's arrest. In short, the visit wasn't knocked off course.
- A relatively small protester turnout and a relatively large Church turnout. The brouhaha before the visit, particularly in the left-of-centre media, suggested that it was resented by the public. Some ten thousand people marched in London against the Pope. This was a reasonable turnout, certainly, but scarcely a popular uprising - and largely consisting, too, of a narrow sliver of society. But the test of the visit was always likely to be whether British Catholics turned out for the Pope. They did, in tens of thousands.
- The Queen. She made it known that she wanted the visit to go well. That she did will have been no small contributor to its success.
