Ed West is a journalist and social commentator who specialises in politics, religion and low culture. He is @edwestonline on Twitter.
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Lovely comments too.Papal visit: Why were no Africans protesting the Pope?
By Ed West Religion Last updated: September 20th, 2010
Contrary to what many claim, Catholics had no problem with people protesting the Pope’s visit; they were even prepared to tolerate people carrying offensive banners calling him a paedophile, a Nazi, a murderer, and other placards more reminiscent of East Belfast than West London. It’s a free country – most Catholics just don’t understand why someone would bother wasting their Saturday afternoon.
I’m sure the protesters had fun, some of them bringing their kids along (isn’t that child abuse in their book?) It was generally good-humoured. When three counter-protesters stood with a Vatican flag and had it ripped away by the crowd, a rather scary-looking feminist went over to apologise and make sure they weren’t upset. All very English and secular in the best sense.
And not all the banners were nasty. One read “Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings”, which was clever, and also idiotic: the Pope cherishes science, and has consistently attacked fundamentalist religions that reject reason. He just thinks faith has an important role in morally regulating science, and the career of the moon landing’s Werhner von Braum shows how science can be used both for good and evil (besides which, the astronauts of the Apollo mission were a devout bunch, even for the standards of 1960s America).
What Catholics, and their fellow travellers, do find a bit galling is the demand heard on Saturday for the Pope to “get out of our country”. The papal protestors have consistently treated the Pope like some sort of radical cleric forcing his strange oriental beliefs on our country.
But whose country is it? Britain doesn’t belong to Peter Tatchell or the National Secular Society, and while they are part of our political culture, they don’t own it. The ideas they support – sexual liberation, gay rights, universal contraception and abortion on demand – are, to quote Christopher Caldwell, novelties rather than time-worn European values. Many churchgoers are sympathetic to some of the ideas – at least to gay rights – but the Church itself is a moral supertanker that cannot turn with every innovation. It may in the future, if they last the test of time.
And although many Catholics are ahead of the mothership in accepting change, to millions of British people the Pope still represents our civilisation and our country and our values, far more than those protesting his arrival, whose inability to distinguish difference of opinion and extremism is a symptom of radicals everywhere.
One prominent blogger said it was hypocritical that Right-wingers protested Islamist Yusuf al-Qaradawi but not the Pope. Qaradawi defends the execution of homosexuals and the murder of Israeli civilians – the day we welcome a Pope who believes those things, or who threatens secular democracy, believe me, I’ll join the protest too. (Tatchell has been the most consistent opponent of Qaradawi in Britain. The problem with arguing with Peter Tatchell is that, unlike with many Leftists, it’s impossible to counter him by saying “why don’t you protest against so and so as well”, since the chances are he has, and has the bruises to show.)
But in one sense the protestors were right about “our country” – despite the most prominent theme of Saturday’s protest being the Church’s condom policy in Africa, there was not a single African in the march as far as I could see. There were a handful of black British people and a handful of Asian women, but the crowd was 99 per cent white and very middle-class looking.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Some of the noblest protests, from Prague 68 to Tehran 09, have been dominated by the middle-class; neither does their racial composition make any difference to their message – either they’re right or wrong. But it is strange that no Africans came to protest Vatican policy in Africa.
In contrast thousands of Africans came to welcome the pope in Hyde Park, Ugandans, Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Malawians and many others, as well as thousands of Filipinos, Indians, Iraqis, Poles, Germans, and Irish. The masses gathered there largely represented the children of immigrants brought in to work while Europeans enjoyed the labours of their ancestors. Undoubtedly they want to be part of European civilisation and our way of life – and it’s represented best by the man in the white Mercedes-Benz.
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