Hello Peter,
Interesting insight you bring up here, and I see nothing that might mar feelings or beliefs in what you say. In fact you present it in a very real and factual manner that pretty much amuses me, because if I do not make any big deal about these travels it simply is because they do NOT achieve any positive results and maybe even create quite the opposite.
It would be beyond an Adland’s forum capacity (sorry Bogdan! J) to get into the real ground floor issue of the matter, even if we all agree that it is more than an issue. Suffice to say that the Pope is not a political leader, and that statement is already a political statement in itself!
Since the Vatican council of the 1960’s the Church has fallen into the error of “religious freedom” it now proclaims (Many times condemned by earlier Popes). And by so doing, for the sake of inter-religious talkings, they have opened the Pandora box they thought to have sealed. Religious freedom not only brings about religious indifference but gives equal rights to good as well as to evil, thereby preventing the very objectives it sought to obtain.
Having proclaimed “Urbi et Orbi” human dignity above all else, the man is now confronted with the necessary political correctness that prohibits his authority of proclaiming “Urbi et Orbi” the dignity of God, and that man’s only and real freedom and dignity stems from his kneeling down in front of he who redeemed us by accepting our sins to nail him unto the cross so as to be the perfect and total sacrifice only capable of stemming the wrath of God of our inherent sins. Yep, the truth sets you free and at all levels, sheer common sense to me.
This situation is precisely what Pope Pius X denounced as early as in 1905, not surprising that there is a priestly society erected to his name and patronage since, whatever the world’s political correctness is or is not for the day at hand, because politics as fashion has a knack of getting itself out-of-fashion sometimes overnight!
Okay, some may think this is drifting way off from the subject at hand, but I do not. Either we accept separation of state and faith or not, but if we do then why expect the Pope to be political? One super big knot one way or the other.
Friendly yours,
Robert.