Wave of Catholic unity for penitent Pope

Say what you will, they’ve certainly been lucky with the weather where Hyde Park’s doing a good job of living up to still, sunny, Bellahouston Park, in Glasgow, on Thursday.
 
They’ve come from Newcastle, Norwich, Swansea, Penzance – you name it.  They’ve come of course from countless countries around the globe as well.
 
I look out over a sea of people – could be up around 80,000 or more by the time the Pope is onstage around 6.15 in theory but probably a lot later in reality.
 
I get a great sense here of celebration tinged with relief.

Celebration of the Pope for a religion which holds him to be something more than their fellow man.

Onstage now they’re playing up the numbers. 1.6 billion people are Catholic, worldwide. One in six human beings is a baptized Catholic.

Clearly a church – a religion- in some need if talking itself up. Selling itself even, to the faithful. I have witnessed this close up for some days now.

Right now a young man on stage tells his story of salvation from drug abuse, at the hands and with the support of a Catholic organisation.

It is as if the church the organisation, the entity, knows it is a in deeply troubled in hard times. The need for shared comfort in their faith, as palpable.

Hardly anybody wants to be trained as a Catholic priest in the UK today. The low figure much publicised this week.

So gatherings like this, with the boss, are a great comfort for a church which, as Benedict has reminded us all everyday of this State Visit, is in decline just as Anglicanism is in these islands.

In that regard there’s a genuine Anglo-Catholic message: faced with the march of secularism, they genuinely are all in this together.

Pope Benedict XVI and the Archbishop of Canterbury as good as said that at Lambeth Palace yesterday.

Are two churches ultimately bound as one by what they both fear most, our growing godlessness?