About five years ago, after Pope Benedict XVI paid a surprisingly successful visit to not-famously-Catholic England, I wrote a column on the phenomenon of papal visits and why, even in a secularized and dissenting Western atmosphere, they tend to turn out well:
… the crowds came out, as they always do for papal visits — 85,000 for a prayer vigil in London, 125,000 lining Edinburgh’s streets, 50,000 in Birmingham to see Benedict beatify John Henry Newman, the famous Victorian convert from Anglicanism. Even at a time of Catholic scandal, even amid a pontificate that’s stumbled from one public-relations debacle to another, Benedict still managed to draw a warm and enthusiastic audience.
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