There is no question of my declining your kind invitation; rather, the talk I would give is not the talk you would want. I think that the Papal Visit is lamentable. I could do nothing but deplore it. And I ask you to hear my reasons.

It is not the sensationalism and vulgarity against which I complain — the souvenirs, the “logo”, the Popemobile, the hiring of a publicity-agent, the whole unlovely apparatus of a whistle-stop tour. After all, if the thing is going to take place at all, it will have to be financed from somewhere, and the cost seems crippling enough to call for every money-making scheme that ingenuity can devise or gullibility fall for. There is, I suppose, something vaguely comic about it all, but then there always is something vaguely comic in the travels of the very great. No, if there were no more to it all than a chance for crowds to see the Pope, my reaction would be very much what it is to cup-ties, or Butlin’s, or pilgrimages to Lourdes: carry on, God bless you, don’t expect me to join in, have a good time. Unfortunately, much more is involved, and if I had to state in a phrase what that something more is, I would say that the Visit is profoundly and damagingly misleading. Let me say why.

You will know that recent events and changes in our own Church - the concept of Oecumenism, the recovery of the Bible, the Second Vatican Council — are examples of how Christians of all denominations are trying to come to terms with their past and to understand it.