Well done Edmund, you've really put your foot in it now

Cheers Edmund. I'd just about convinced my friends in Australia just how wonderful life in London really is. It's an ancient, ever-new beautiful colossus of a city. Sprawling, yet elegant. Dirty, yet venerable. It boasts as many shades of green as it does walks of life. Despite reports to the contrary the sun does still rise and set, the wind does still blow, and the city remains a physical testament to both the glory of God's creation and the height of the achievements of men. It is very far from being a grim, grey city or simply the mechanical, industrial workhouse of a damp, clouded island. On certain summer evenings (when in an optimistic mood), at just the right moment as sky and earth bleed into each other on the banks of Serptentine, one could even be forgiven for thinking he had never left Australia.

Then Edmund had to stick his two cents in. Pope Benedict XVI is coming to England so Edmund Adamus, director of Pastoral Affairs for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster, thought he'd fill him in about some of those little bits of insider info that he wouldn't have seen in his lonely planet guidebook. And what did he have to say about my fair city?

[W]hether we like it or not as British citizens and residents of this country -- and whether we are even prepared as Catholics to accept this reality and all it implies -- the fact is that historically, and continuing right now, Britain, and in particular London, has been and is the geopolitical epicenter of the culture of death.

Geopolitical epicenter of the culture of death.

Why on earth would he say something like that?

Fr Tim Finigan explains why...

The culture of the London-centred secularist elite in Britain is more radically and comprehensively opposed to fundamental Catholic values than Islam, Hinduism, military-junta-backed Buddhism or even communism. As a culture, its advocates show more intelligence than to persecute Catholics too obviously, but they relentlessly work to draw us into collaboration and compromise until we are unable any longer to speak out for the truth - or more pertinently, for the sanctity of the life of those who are the smallest and weakest of all.

John Smeaton explains why...

When Edmund speaks of "anti-Catholic landscapes" and of Catholics being openly persecuted, I would extend that to include, for example, all parents, whatever their faith, fighting to protect their children from pornographic sex education as well as the use of their children's schools by the government, with the co-operation of the Catholic authorities in England and Wales, to promote access to abortion without parental knowledge or consent.