Crusade against the pope: an Inquisition-in-Reverse

This article was published in Spiked-Online 16 September 2010

The campaigners against the pope’s visit have more in common with the fanatical Inquisitors of old than with Enlightened liberal humanists.

Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain, which starts today, has provided much of the British cultural elite with a figure that it is okay to hate. Indeed, anti-Catholic prejudice is one of the main themes of today’s increasingly conformist imagination. It has reached a level where anyone who doesn’t possess a strong feeling of animosity towards the pope and his visit is viewed as a hopeless apologist for the abusive authority of theocratic despots.

The current display of anti-papal prejudice is not only conformist. Worse than that, it is the kind of conformism that is usually seen amongst children who, under peer pressure, compete to see who can come up with the meanest phrase to castigate the playground scapegoat.

Consider the infantile exchange between anti-papal zealots who were recently asked what they would say to the pope if they met him. ‘Go home to your tinpot Mussolini-concocted principality, and don’t come back’, said the Grand Inquisitor of the new atheist sandbox, Richard Dawkins ...