Pope Benedict XVI to pay state visit to Britain

Five months ago, St. Andrew Bobola’s was a church in mourning. One of its beloved priests, Bronislaw Gostomski, was among those killed in a plane crash in Russia that wiped out much of the leadership of Poland, including the president.

But grief has given way to a small buzz of anticipation here in Gostomski’s former parish in west London. A Polish-speaking Roman Catholic congregation of more than 1,000 worshipers, St. Andrew Bobola’s is getting ready for a rare visit to Britain this week by Pope Benedict XVI.

About a quarter of the church’s members have signed up to attend an evening vigil with the pope in London’s Hyde Park. Others plan to follow the pontiff on TV, like Arletta Ziolkowska, 32, who can’t go in person because of her infant daughter.

“The church is very important to me,” Ziolkowska said after a recent morning Mass, which she tries to attend three times a week.

Benedict’s four-day tour of Britain, starting Thursday, is the first by a pope in almost three decades and the first state visit by a pontiff since Henry VIII broke with Rome nearly 500 years ago in pursuit of a divorce from his wife.

Unlike John Paul II, who came in a purely pastoral capacity in 1982, Benedict will land on these shores as a visiting head of state who has meetings penciled in with Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister David Cameron.

But as head of a religious flock, he will also encounter a Catholic Church in Britain that has undergone significant changes since the last papal visit. Attendance is in decline, and the devout increasingly are immigrants from Eastern Europe and beyond, as exemplified by St. Andrew Bobola’s.

Overall, Britain remains a deeply secular country that smiles indulgently on religious observance, if it pays any attention to it at all. As excited as some Catholics are, the pope’s imminent arrival is being greeted by wider British society with more indifference than enthusiasm, and even hostility from some human-rights activists, feminists, scientists and gay-rights advocates who have threatened to disrupt the visit.

It’s a challenging scenario for a pope who has made revitalizing Christianity in Europe one of the primary missions of his papacy, even as the Vatican struggles to contain the ongoing scandal over clerical sex abuse.

But Benedict, who speaks fluent English, is unfazed, Vatican-watchers say. In a choice rich with symbolism, on his last day here the pontiff is scheduled to beatify John Henry Newman, a 19th century academic and convert to Catholicism who launched a revival campaign in Britain known as the Oxford Movement.

In some ways, Britain’s 5 million Catholics are doing better than ever here in a land that openly discriminated against them until the 19th century. Many occupy positions of power in the political and business worlds; their most famous recent convert is former Prime Minister Tony Blair (though some say it would’ve been politically impossible for him to convert while still serving as premier). The only thing a Catholic cannot be is a royal spouse.

For some years now, churchgoing Catholics have outnumbered their Anglican counterparts, even though British society remains predominantly Anglican, at least culturally. But regular weekly attendance in both the Catholic Church and the Church of England, at less than a million each, is declining every year in this nation of about 60 million people.

Fortunately for the Catholic Church, the drop has been offset by the influx of Catholic immigrants to Britain, especially from Poland and other former Soviet bloc countries, but also from as far away as India and the Philippines. In one recent survey, about 10% of Catholics in England and Wales identified themselves as Eastern Europeans, far greater than their proportion in the population.

“The institution that these migrants trusted the most when they arrived was the church, because they knew it from home,” said Francis Davis, director of Las Casas Institute at Oxford University, a Catholic think tank.

In London, Davis said, immigrants helped rescue some parishes that were dying, including one whose attendance shot up from 40 to 800 after it introduced a Mass in Portuguese.

But the new arrivals have also presented the church with challenges. Immigration issues are now a focus for church leaders, who have spoken out on the need for tolerance and fair treatment of foreigners.

“London is a difficult place,” said Marek Reczek, a priest at St. Andrew Bobola’s, who moved to Britain three years ago. “When people come here, they have problems with language, where to live, where to work.… Polish people phone up, and I want to help because they are my people.”

Davis said immigrants are expected to make up a significant portion of the crowd at the pope’s public appearances in Britain.

Tickets for those events, however, are not being snapped up as quickly as hoped.

One reason is apparently the onerous procedures for attending. Participants must be screened by their churches and, in some instances, must pay as much as $38 for specially arranged transportation and a “pilgrim pack” of souvenirs and devotional items. No one will be allowed just to show up.

For security reasons, attendees will have to arrive hours early and wait for the pope to appear. At an event in Glasgow, they will not be permitted to use umbrellas, a dicey proposition, given Scottish weather.

Critics say the potential $18.5-million cost to British taxpayers to host the pontiff is an unacceptable waste of money during a time of government austerity. A coalition of activists, including atheist organizations and gay-rights groups, has planned a series of “Nope to pope” protests.

Observers will be closely watching a planned meeting between Benedict and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the spiritual leader of Anglicans worldwide. Last year, the pope stunned Williams by announcing that he would create a special dispensation for priests and parishes who wished to switch from Anglicanism to Catholicism.

In a display of Christian unity, the pontiff and Williams are scheduled to pray together in Westminster Abbey.

“The idea is to emphasize the role of both churches,” said Vincent Nichols, the archbishop of Westminster and head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. “Faith in God is not a problem to be solved, but a fight. In this, both churches are allies.”

henry.chu@latimes.com

Stobart is a staff writer in The Times’ London Bureau.