Pope Benedict XVI and His UK Critics

The visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the United Kingdom must be judged a smashing success. (More on why in a future post.) He brought hope and courage to Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and all who still dare stand up to the "dictatorship of relativism."

The Pope's angry, noisy critics have done their best to be rude but they have clearly been shown to be a tiny minority who do not speak for the majority of British subjects. They are pathetic and comical. In this post we look at three of them.

Richard Dawkins is an eminent scientist who has left off doing science and turned to theology, at which he is about as good as Hitler was at painting. He is a one man Monty Python sketch: here is a man who believes that it is more likely that little green men from outer space created life on planet earth than that God did - and he claims to be the voice of Reason.

Stephen Fry is a TV personality, a writer, a homosexual and an atheist who signed a letter protesting the Pope's visit. Gullible and vulnerable people who need reassurance for their decadent lifestyles appear to be susceptible to his marketing abilities. From the Daily Mail via Virtue Online:

Stephen Fry, along with many of the other celebrities who have criticised the Pope's visit, has a book to promote.

The quizmaster and author is holding signings of The Fry Chronicles in Norwich, Cambridge and Oxford this week, backed by a high-profile advertising campaign by his publisher. It has spent tens of thousands of pounds on promoting him with advertising in every national newspaper. His attacks on the Pope's visit have placed him at the centre of a storm of publicity.

His book signings are major productions with ticket prices to match. They are billed as 'An intimate evening with Stephen Fry'.

The promotional material adds: 'To mark the publication of his hugely anticipated second volume of memoirs [he] will give audiences an exclusive preview of his revealing, charming and extraordinary new book.'

Fry's readings on September 20 and 21 at the Royal Albert Hall are sold out, with ticket prices ranging between £30 and £55, excluding booking fees. The reading today in Cambridge costs £20.50.

Apparently, being an atheist in the UK does not require courage and the ability to shrug off social isolation and condemnation. On the contrary, it seems to pay rather well.

But the biggest fraud of all is Peter Tratchell, a homosexual rights campaigner who is so hypocritical as to blame Pope Benedict XVI for the sexual abuse of children by priests even though Benedict condemns such acts as "filth" while he (Tratchell) is on record as arguing that sex with children may not be all that bad. Peter Hitchens catalogs this hypocrisy with admirable restraint but utter moral clarity on his blog:

I (as a non-Roman Catholic) have examined some of the main charges levelled against Benedict XVI by his attackers, and found that several of them are simply untrue, whereas others have been crudely distorted.

I have also examined the record of one of the main critics of the Papal visit.

This is Peter Tatchell, prominent in the ‘Protest the Pope’ campaign.

I admire Mr Tatchell’s physical and moral courage, notably when he was badly beaten by Robert Mugabe’s bodyguards for attempting a citizen’s arrest of that monster. The effects of that beating still trouble him.

But this does not cancel out what I believe is the hypocrisy of his attempt - and that of the Left in general - to wage war on the Pope by employing the charge of condoning or failing to act against paedophilia (it is No  5 in the charge-sheet set out by ‘Protest the Pope’).

For on June 26, 1997, Mr Tatchell wrote a start­ling letter to the Guardian newspaper.

In it, he defended an academic book about ‘Boy-Love’ against what he saw as calls for it to be censored.

When I contacted him on Friday, he emphasised that he is ‘against sex between adults and children’ and that his main purpose in writing the letter had been to defend free speech.

He told me: ‘I was opposing calls for censorship generated by this book. I was not in any way condoning paedophilia.’

Personally, I think he went a bit further than that. He wrote that the book’s arguments were not shocking, but ‘courageous’.

He said the book documented ‘examples of societies where consenting inter-generational sex is considered normal’.

He gave an example of a New Guinea tribe where ‘all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood’ and allegedly grow up to be ‘happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers’.

And he concluded: ‘The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures.

'Several of my friends - gay and straight, male and female - had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13.

'None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy.

‘While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.’

Well, it’s a free country. And I’m rather grateful that Mr Tatchell, unlike most of his allies, is honest enough to discuss openly where the sexual revolution may really be headed.

The amount of coverage the media gives to these clowns is a scandal. They deserve to rot in obscurity, not be front page news. The liberal bias of the media is on display every time one of them gets coverage that would more justifiably be spent on analyzing the reasoned arguments given by Pope Benedict XVI for the need of secular societies to draw their moral beliefs from Christianity if they are to remain free and strong.