Brown makes third trip to the Vatican WORLD BULLETIN

Edward Pentin’s Vatican Notebook
New Labour may be deeply secular, but you wouldn’t think that looking at the Vatican’s guestbook over the past six years.
The visit of the Prime Minister Gordon Brown to the Pope this week was his third to the Vatican in five years. It follows three visits by Tony Blair, and one by Foreign Secretary David Miliband (then Secretary of State for the Environment) a couple of years ago. John Major never came to the Vatican, nor met Pope John Paul II during his premiership. Margaret Thatcher made just one visit as Prime Minister, but was here in a private capacity last year.
Mr Brown first came to the Vatican in 2004. He had planned to meet John Paul II to obtain the Pope’s support for his International Finance Facility (IFF), a scheme to fund immunisations for poor children around the world.
However, John Paul, very frail and resting at Castel Gandolfo, was unable to see him, so Mr Brown made do with a lightning visit to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace where he developed a good rapport with the council’s president, Cardinal Renato Martino.
Mr Brown then returned in 2007 to launch the IFF. He met Pope Benedict XVI for the first time, together with other world leaders. By that time, Benedict XVI had personally invested in the scheme. Now Mr Brown, a Presbyterian Scot, has met the Pope for the first time as Prime Minister. Tony Blair didn’t come to the Vatican until 2003, six years into his premiership. Apparently, he was reluctant to make the trip but was persuaded to do so by his Catholic wife Cherie. It was on that visit that he received Holy Communion from John Paul II at a private Mass in the Pope’s chapel, and was reported to be very ill-at-ease after meeting the Holy Father. The Iraq war broke out just days later. Mr Blair then made two more Vatican visits, both private audiences with Pope Benedict.
All this means that Mr Brown and Mr Blair have now each made three Vatican visits in total. Never one to be upstaged by his political rival, perhaps we can expect another Vatican visit by Mr Blair in the near future.
The rehabilitation of Galileo continues. On Sunday, a Mass was celebrated in the Vatican in memory of the 16th century astronomer to mark the 445th anniversary of his birth. Presided over by Archbishop Gianfranco Rivasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, the Mass was attended by scien
tists and astronomers from all over the world, including Russia and China.
Archbishop Ravasi said Galileo had the ability to distinguish between two kinds of “reason”: that of science, and that of truth, necessary for salvation and communicated through the Holy Spirit. Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone gave a blessing on the Holy Father’s behalf, and sent a message saying Galileo was “rightly called a divine man”.
Somehow, the recent PR missteps of the Vatican don’t look so serious compared to the Galileo case. Five hundred years later, and the controversy still bubbles on, but perhaps – just perhaps – closure is in sight.