From ALAN McELWA1N in Rome
CARDINAL HEENAN holds high hopes that Pope Paul will visit England in 1967 for the opening of the new Liverpool Cathedral. He will certainly be invited for the occasion.
The Cardinal told this to a group of Anglo-American journalists when, at a dinner in his honour, he was asked where he thought Pope Paul, so obviously intent on travelling, might go in the future.
The Pope, Cardinal Heenan added. had a particularly warm affection for England, which he had visited as a young priest. He had demonstrated this affection not long ago when he had asked the English Hierarchy to suggest the name for a new church in Romc---and they had chosen St. Augustine.
Pope Paul would be known to history as a Great Pope, the Cardinal said. He was emerging as such in his own way and his own time.
It had been difficult for him to follow Pope John. He was seen as more in the mould of the late Pope Pius XII, who had himself been acclaimed an outstanding Pontiff.
Tremendous warmth
The odd thing about Pope Paul was that while to the outside world he appeared somewhat cold and reserved, when you met and talked to him you were struck immediately by his tremendous warmth and spontaneity.
Cardinal Heenan was asked about what he called wryly his "lamentable" article on Pope John—"lamentable" because it had been so badly misinterpreted in some quarters.
He had not tried to "play down" Pope John, but merely to correct certain wrong impressions which were being attributed to him. He loved Pope John and thought he was the greatest Pope since Pope Gregory the Great.
Cardinal Heenan said 'that a statement by Pope Paul on mixed marriages was expected soon. It would probably be made shortly after the Pope's return from the United Nations, the visit to which, next Monday, was preoccupying him at present.
The question of mixed marriages came before the Vatican Council in the closing week of last year's session. The text put before the Bishops suggested that the cautiones—the written uromises to bring up the children as Catholics—would be abolished and mixed marriages
celebrated in non Catholic churches recognised as valid.
Cardinal Heenan recalled his own statement in the Council on mixed marriages, in which he had urged that these be joyful occasions and not the dismal affairs into which they had been turned in the past.
He thought it certain that Pope Paul would also make his promised statement on birth control before the end of this fourth and final session of the Council.
The Pope had taken the matter away from the Council last session and it was hardly likely that he would let the Bishops disperse still leaving it in the air.
Communism
Cardinal Heenan repeated what he had said in London: that the Catholic Church was not against birth control. It did not tell married couples to have as many children as they could in the shortest possible time. What the Church now had under review was not birth control but methods of birth control.
The Cardinal was asked why Schema 13—The Church in the Modern World—made no specific condemnation, or even mention of Communism.
He said the Council was following Pope John's charter, which was to avoid "condemnation" of other people's beliefs or unbeliefs. On the other hand, the Catholic Church's views on Communism were well known.