Papal Visit 2010
The official website for ths year’s visit by the Holy Father is now available here.
Itinerary
Pope Benedict XVI will visit England and Scotland on a four-day state visit from 16-19 September 2010.
Scotland
Pope Benedict will be received at the Palace of Holyroodhouse by Her Majesty The Queen.
He will celebrate a public Mass in Glasgow.
Midlands
His Holiness will also visit the West Midlands to beatify the nineteenth century theologian and educationalist Cardinal John Henry Newman at a public mass in Coventry.
London
His Holiness will give a major speech to British civil society at Westminster Hall.
He will be present at a prayer vigil.
There will be an event focusing on education.
Relations between the Christian Churches will be a theme of the visit as will the relations between the major faiths.
The Holy Father will visit the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace.
Pope Benedict will pray with other Church leaders at Westminster Abbey.
I am very disappointed to learn that Pope Benedict will not be visiting the North-East of England during his trip to the UK. Christianity first took roots in Britain in the North-East, and today is still home to a thriving Catholic community. The region’s religious and cultural heritages are intertwined, and impacted on the spread of Christianity throughout the British Isles – Hilda, Oswald, Bede, and Cuthbert are some of the most well-known and influential British saints.
We in the North have already suffered the ignomony of being told that we and our facilities (which included Durham Cathedral and the Lindisfarne Priory) are inadequate to maintain the Lindisfarne Gospels, and artefact crafted in Northumbria and appropriated by Henry VIII during the land-snatch that was the Dissolution of the Monasteries – what can we gather from this snub but that we are incapable of hosting a visit by His Holiness to the place where our faith first found expression?