Vatcian City - The Pope will not stay at Buckingham Palace and has declined an open-carriage procession and palace banquet during his state visit to Britain next year.
Although Pope Benedict XVI will be a guest of the Queen he will stay with his Ambassador to the Court of St James, the Apostolic Nuncio, at his house in Wimbledon, southwest London.
The Pope will spend one day in Scotland during the three-day visit from September 16 to 19. In spite of pleas from lay members of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland for him to visit them and apologise in person for decades of child abuse by members of the clergy exposed in a recent report, he is unlikely to do so before 2012.
Jim Murphy, a Catholic MP who is Secretary of State for Scotland and heads the government team in charge of the visit, said that while it would have the status of a state visit, the Vatican did not want the trappings that accompany such a visit.
“It’s a unique constitutional arrangement as the Pope is head of a faith and the head of state,” Mr Murphy told The Tablet, the Catholic weekly.
“The official title is ‘papal visit with the status of a state visit’. Normally state visits include banquets and gold carriages but the Vatican doesn’t want that.”
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales and the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland have drawn up an itinerary that is now with the Holy See and includes public Masses and ecumenical events. The Pope will meet the Queen in Scotland, where she will be at Balmoral.
The organisers will be anxious to avoid embarrassing conflict with Anglicans, as arrangements move forward for new Anglican Ordinariates for traditionalists who wish to convert to Catholicism.
There had been speculation that the papal visit might be downgraded from state to pastoral because of embarrassment over the offer to traditionalists, regarded by some Anglicans as an attempt to poach from their flocks.
One Catholic bishops’ conference has already gone so far as to give traditionalist Anglicans a church for Christmas.
In Scotland, Catholic Anglicans will this year celebrate Christmas in a Catholic chapel in a convent. St Catherine’s convent chapel in Tollcross, Edinburgh, was a gift from Scotland’s Catholic bishops and was made available by the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh.
Canon Len Black, a Scottish Episcopal priest in Inverness, said there were no traditionalist parishes in Edinburgh but up to 50 lay men and women who needed a traditional service.
The Scottish Episcopal Church, one of 38 provinces in the worldwide Anglican Communion, last week shortlisted a woman for an episcopal vacancy, meaning that Scotland could have the UK’s first Anglican woman bishop.
Canon Black welcomed the unprecedented Christmas gift.
“This move has come about because of the rapid drift of the Scottish Episcopal Church away from the traditional faith, morals and practices of the universal Church,” he said.
“When the Scottish Episcopal Church first decided to ordain women as priests some 15 years ago we were assured of a ‘valued and honoured place’ within the Church ‘for all time to come’.
“That promise has not been honoured and today some of our people even find that they are being told they are no longer welcome in the churches in which they were baptised as infants. Now we find that the provision we were hoping for from our own Church is being offered to all disaffected Anglicans by the Catholic Church.”
Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, commented: “I am delighted to help provide a place of worship for these traditionalist Anglicans, taking the lead from Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessor Pope John Paul II.”