Pope faces protests in the UK

16 Sep 2010, 10:11 am   -   Source: AAP
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Pope Benedict XVI begins a historic state visit to Britain hoping to improve strained links between Catholics and Anglicans but also facing anger.

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Pope Benedict XVI begins a historic state visit to Britain hoping to improve strained links between Catholics and Anglicans but facing anger from victims of paedophile priests.

The Pope will on Thursday begin his four-day tour visiting Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and the city of Birmingham in central England, where the highlight takes place with a beatification mass for 19th century English cardinal John Henry Newman.

The visit features an audience with Queen Elizabeth II in Edinburgh, two open-air masses and a prayer vigil, as well as highly symbolic prayers with the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the head of the world's Anglicans.

But in a taste of the protests he is likely to face, British victims of clerical abuse held a press conference in London Wednesday to demand the pope go further than offer an apology.

Peter Saunders, of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, said: "We need the Pope to say, 'I will hand over all the information I have about abusing priests wherever they are in the world. I will hand it over to the authorities of the countries where these people are being protected.'"

The Pope is widely expected to meet victims of abuse during his visit, but the survivors said they were unaware of anyone being offered a meeting.

Another victim, 45-year-old Chris Daly, said the physical and emotional abuse he suffered at the hands of nuns in a Scottish children's home in the 1970s "has cast a shadow as long as a lifetime".

"I'm broken by what happened to me. People say that this is historic, this is in the past, but survivors live with the legacy of the abuse every day," he told the press conference.

The abuse issue has been thrown back into the spotlight with the publication this week of a plan to deal with paedophile priests in Belgium.

But Benedict will also face protests against his unbending stance on issues such as his opposition to contraception and women priests when an expected 2,000 demonstrators march in London on Saturday under the "Protest the Pope" banner.

Polls show that more than two-thirds of Britons are opposed to the visit.

And Benedict is likely to receive a more muted welcome from Britain's five million Catholics than the huge crowds which greeted his predecessor John Paul II when he paid a pastoral visit to Britain 28 years ago.

It emerged on Wednesday that one of the Pope's key advisers will not accompany Benedict after comparing Britain to a "Third World country" whose increasingly secular nature frustrated the Vatican.

Asked by German magazine Focus about why so many Britons opposed the visit, Cardinal Walter Kasper replied: "England is a secularised, pluralistic country these days. When you land at Heathrow Airport, you sometimes think you might have landed in a Third World country."

Kasper dropped out of the entourage for "health reasons", Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said after British media reported he had been barred from the trip.

The 83-year-old Pope will have an audience with the Queen after flying in to Edinburgh, before taking to the popemobile for the first time ahead of an open-air mass at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow.

In an unprecedented move, pilgrims must pay up to STG25 ($A41) to attend the masses as a contribution towards the STG20 million ($A33 million) cost of the visit.

The Pope will move from Scotland late on Thursday to spend the next two days in London before moving north to Birmingham to beatify Cardinal Newman, a high-profile convert to Catholicism, in an open-air mass on Sunday.

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