AS THE KING and Queen touched down in Rome, Ed Stourton gave PM (Radio 4, Wednesday of last week) a historically literate review of the state visit’s importance. He told listeners that, although ecumenism was now routine, shared worship represented a shift from previous royal visits to the Vatican, where, going back to King Edward VII in 1903, religious sensitivities precluded anyone from doing God.
English Roman Catholicism, Stourton argued, was on something of a roll, with Newman’s canonisation (News, 25 October 2019), four English cardinals in office simultaneously, and official royal funerals in Westminster Cathedral (News, 19 September). Nobody mentioned that Sunday mass attendance in England was at barely one third of its level in 1980.
Thursday of last week was a busy news day; so the Sistine Chapel service itself got broadly positive coverage in the top-of-the-hour headlines on both BBC and commercial radio — some even refrained from mentioning Prince Andrew — but was generally pushed out of the more extended analysis on the prime-time shows.
It was bitterly ironic that it was the acquittal of Soldier F on seven counts of murder and attempted murder on Bloody Sunday that did most to squeeze events at the Sistine Chapel from the airwaves. In the region where the service should have mattered most, while it was the second item on BBC Radio Ulster’s drive-time Evening Extra, it otherwise went unmentioned.
Those brief seconds of coverage, however, contained a comment that was powerful precisely because it was understated, from the RC Bishop of Derry, the Rt Revd Donal McKeown, who said that the service was “a confirmation of things that have been going on for decades” in terms of shared worship and shared action on social justice. Bishop McKeown’s predecessor but one, Edward Daly, was still the local curate on Bloody Sunday, and gave the last rites to the teenager Jackie Duddy.
RTÉ Radio 1’s flagship News at One found space for an interview with Elise Ann Allen, of the RC news site Crux, but Ms Allen made it sound as though the state visit was a tentative early step in “reconciliation and rapprochement” between two Churches whose “history is rife with tension”, not the fruit of an advanced ecumenical relationship that began more than a century ago at the Malines Conversations.
Heart and Soul (BBC World Service, last Friday) produced another fascinating programme on Christianity among exiles from North Korea. In a Shanghai prison, after escaping to China as a teenager, Timothy Cho was taught to pray by an ex-gangster from the South. After unanswered prayers left him doubting, Mr Cho bargained with God: if freed, he would dedicate his life to him; if sent back to North Korea, he would deny his existence.
After some extraordinary incidents, he came to the UK, and now worships at an Evangelical Anglican church while working as a clerk to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea.